The Price of Salt

by Highsmith, Patricia

  Fred is prepared for anything however. He is wonderful, the only person who talks straight to me, but unfortunately he knows least of all too.

  You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands, and your eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember your courage that I hadn't suspected, and it gives me courage. Will you call me, darling? I don't want to call you if your phone is in the hall. Call me collect around 7 P.M. preferably, which is 6 your time.

  And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram came: DON'T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE, EXPLAIN LATER, ALL MY LOVE, DARLING CAROL.

  Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. "That from your friend?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Hope nothing's the matter." Mrs. Cooper had a way of peering at people, and Therese lifted her head deliberately.

  "No, she's coming," Therese said. "She's been delayed."

  CHAPTER 21

  ALBERT KENNEDY, BERT to people he liked, lived in a room at the back of the house, and was one of Mrs. Cooper's original lodgers. He was forty-five, a native of San Francisco, and more like a New Yorker than anyone Therese had met in the town, and this fact alone inclined her to avoid him. Often he asked Therese to go to the movies with him, but she had gone only once. She was restless and she preferred to wander about by herself, mostly just looking and thinking, because the days were too cold and windy for any outdoor sketching. And the scenes she had liked at first had grown too stale to sketch, from too much looking, too much waiting. Therese went to the library almost every evening, sat at one of the long tables looking over half a dozen books, and then took a meandering course homeward.

  She came back to the house only to wander out again after a while, stiffening herself against the erratic wind, or letting it turn her down streets she would not otherwise have followed. In the lighted windows she would see a girl seated at a piano, in another a man laughing, in another a woman sewing. Then he remembered she could not even call Carol, admitted to herself she did not even know what Carol was doing at this moment, and she felt emptier than the wind. Carol did not tell her everything in her letters, she felt, did not tell her the worst.

  In the library, she looked at books with photographs of Europe in them, marble fountains in Sicily, ruins of Greece in sunlight, and she wondered if she and Carol would really ever go there. There was still so much they had not done. There was the first voyage across the Atlantic. There were simply the mornings, mornings anywhere, when she could lift her head from a pillow and see Carol's face, and know that the day was theirs and that nothing would separate them.

  And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and the eyes at once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street where she had never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench some forgotten and nameless thirst inside her. Most of its porcelain surface was painted with small bright lozenges of colored enamel, royal blue and deep red and green, outlined with coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even under its film of dust. There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger. It was a tiny candlestick holder. Who had made it, she wondered, and for whom?

  She came back the next morning and bought it to give to Carol.

  A letter from Richard had come that morning, forwarded from Colorado Springs. Therese sat down on one of the stone benches in the street where the library was, and opened it. It was on business stationery: The Semco Bottled Gas Company. Cooks—Heats—Makes Ice. Richard's name was at the top as General Manager of the Port Jefferson Branch.

  Dear Therese,

  I have Dannie to thank for telling me where you are. You may think this letter unnecessary and perhaps it is to you. Perhaps you are still in that fog you were, when we talked that evening in the cafeteria. But I feel it is necessary to make one thing clear, and that is that I no longer feel the way I did even two weeks ago, and the letter I wrote you last was nothing but a last spasmodic effort, and I knew it was hopeless when I wrote it, and I knew you wouldn't answer and I didn't want you to.

  I know I had stopped loving you then, and now the uppermost emotion I feel toward you is one that was present from the first—disgust. It is your hanging onto this woman to the exclusion of everyone else, this relationship which I am sure has become sordid and pathological by now, that disgusts me. I know that it will not last, as I said from the first.

  It is only regrettable that you will be disgusted later yourself, in proportion to how much of your life you waste now with it. It is rootless and infantile, like living on lotus blossoms or some sickening candy instead of the bread and meat of life. I have often thought of those questions you asked me the day we were flying the kite. I wish I had acted then before it was too late, because I loved you enough then to try to rescue you. Now I don't. People still ask me about you. What do you expect me to tell them? I intend to tell them the truth. Only that way can I get it out of myself—and I can no longer bear to carry it around with me. I have sent a few things you had at the house back to your apartment. The slightest memory or contact with you depresses me, makes me not want to touch you or anything concerned with you. But I am talking sense and very likely you are not understanding a word of it. Except maybe this: I want nothing to do with you.

  Richard

  She saw Richard's thin soft lips tensed in a straight line as they must have looked when he wrote the letter, a line that still did not keep the tiny, taut curl in the upper lip from showing-she saw his face clearly for a moment, and then it vanished with a little jolt that seemed as muffled and remote from her as the clamor of Richard's letter. She stood up, put the letter back in the envelope, and walked on. She hoped he succeeded in purging himself of her. But she could only imagine him telling other people about her with that curious attitude of passionate participation she had seen in New York before she left. She imagined Richard telling Phil as they stood some evening at the Palermo bar, imagined him telling the Kellys. She wouldn't care at all, whatever he said.

  She wondered what Carol was doing now, at ten o'clock, at eleven in New Jersey. Listening to some stranger's accusations? Thinking of her, or was there time for that?

  It was a fine day, cold and almost windless, bright with sun. She could take, the car and drive somewhere. She had not used the car for three days. Suddenly she realized she did not want to use it. The day she had taken it out and driven it up to ninety on the straight road to Dell Rapids, exultant after a letter from Carol, seemed very long ago.

  Mr. Bowen, another of the roomers, was on the front porch when she came back to Mrs. Cooper's house. He was sitting in the sun with his legs wrapped in a blanket and his cap pulled down over his eyes as if he were asleep, but he called out, "Hi, there! How's my girl?"

  She stopped and chatted with him for a while, asked him about his arthritis, trying to be as courteous as Carol had always been with Mrs. French. They found something to laugh at, and she was still smiling when she went to her room. Then the sight of the geranium ended it.

  She watered the geranium and set it at the end of the window sill, where it would get the sun for the longest time. There was even brown at the tips of the smallest leaves at the top. Carol had bought it for her in Des Moines just before she took the plane. The pot of ivy had died already—the man in the shop had warned them it was delicate, but Carol had wanted it anyway—and Therese doubted that the geranium would live.

  But Mrs. Cooper's motley collection of plants flourished in the bay window.

  "I walk and walk around the town," she wrote to Carol, "but I wish I could keep walking in one direction—east—and finally come to you. When can you come, Carol? Or shall I come to you? I really cannot stand being away from you so long...."

  She had her answer the next morning. A check fluttered out of Carol's letter onto Mrs. Cooper's hall floor. The check was for two hundred and fifty dollars. Carol's letter—the long loops looser and lighter, the t-bars stretching the length of the word—said that it was impossible for her to come out within the next two weeks, if then. The
check was for her to fly back to New York and have the car driven East.

  "I'd feel better if you took the plane. Come now and don't wait," was the last paragraph.

  Carol had written the letter in haste, had probably snatched a moment to write it, but there was a coldness in it, too, that shocked Therese. She went out and walked dazedly to the corner and dropped the letter she had written the night before into the mailbox anyway, a heavy letter with three airmail stamps on it. She might see Carol within twelve hours. The thought did not bring any reassurance. Should she leave this morning?

  This afternoon? What had they done to Carol? She wondered if Carol would be furious if she telephoned her, if it would precipitate some crisis into a total defeat if she did?

  She was sitting at a table somewhere with coffee and orange juice in front of her, before she looked at the other letter in her hand. In the upper left corner she could just make out the scrawly handwriting. It was from Mrs. R. Robichek.

  Dear Therese,

  Thank you very much for the delicious sausage that came last month. You are a nice sweet girl and I am glad to have the opportunity to thank you many times. It was nice of you to think of me making such a long trip. I enjoy the pretty post cards, specially the big one from Sioux Falls. How is in South Dakota? Are mountains and cowboys? I have never had chance to travel except Pennsylvania. You are a lucky girl, so young and pretty and kind. Myself I still work. The store is just the same. Everything is the same but it is colder. Please visit me when you come back. I cook a nice dinner for you not from delicatessen. Thank you for the sausage again. I lived from it for many days, really something special and nice. With best regards and yours truly.

  Ruby Robichek

  Therese slid off the stool, left some money on the counter and ran out.

  She ran all the way to the Warrior Hotel, put the call in and waited with the receiver against her ear until she heard the telephone ringing in Carol's house. No one answered. It rang twenty times and no one answered.

  She thought of calling Carol's lawyer, Fred Haymes. She decided she shouldn't. Neither did she want to call Abby.

  That day it rained, and Therese lay on her bed in her room, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for three o'clock, when she intended to telephone again. Mrs. Cooper brought her a tray of lunch around midday. Mrs. Cooper thought she was sick. Therese could not eat the food, however, and she did not know what to do with it.

  She was still trying to reach Carol at five o'clock. Finally the ringing stopped and there was confusion on the wire, a couple of operators questioning each other about the call, and the first words Therese heard from Carol were "Yes, damn it!" Therese smiled and the ache went out of her arms.

  "Hello?" Carol said brusquely.

  "Hello?" The connection was bad. "I got the letter—the one with the check. What happened, Carol?... What?"

  Carol's harassed sounding voice repeated through the crackling interference,"This wire I think is tapped, Therese.... Are you all right?

  Are you coming home? I can't talk very long now."

  Therese frowned, wordless. "Yes, I suppose I can leave today." Then she blurted, "What is it, Carol? I really can't stand this, not knowing anything!"

  "Therese!" Carol drew the word all across Therese's words, like a deletion. "Will you come home so I can talk to you?"

  Therese thought she heard Carol sigh impatiently. "But I've got to know now. Can you see me at all when I come back?"

  "Hang onto yourself, Therese."

  Was this the way they talked together? Were these the words they used?

  "But can you?"

  "I don't know," Carol said.

  A chill ran up her arm, into the fingers that held the telephone. She felt Carol hated her. Because it was her fault, her stupid blunder about the letter Florence had found. Something had happened and perhaps Carol couldn't and wouldn't even want to see her again. "Has the court thing started yet?"

  "It's finished. I wrote you about that. I can't talk any longer. Good-by, Therese." Carol waited for her to reply. "I've got to say good-by."

  Therese put the receiver slowly back on the hook.

  She stood in the hotel lobby, staring at the blurred figures around the front desk. She pulled Carol's letter out of her pocket and read it again, but Carol's voice was closer, saying impatiently, "Will you come home so I can talk to you?" She pulled the check out and looked at it again, upside down, and slowly tore it up. She dropped the pieces into a brass spittoon.

  But the tears did not come until she got back to the house and saw her room again, the double bed that sagged in the middle, the stack of letters from Carol on the desk. She couldn't stay here another night.

  She would go to a hotel for the night, and if the letter Carol had mentioned wasn't here tomorrow morning, she would leave anyway.

  Therese dragged her suitcase down from the closet and opened it on the bed. The folded corner of a white handkerchief stuck out of one of the pockets. Therese took it out and lifted it to her nose, remembering the morning in Des Moines when Carol had put it there, with the dash of perfume on it, and the derisive remark Carol had made about putting it there, that she had laughed at. Therese stood with her hand on the back of a chair and the other hand clenched in a fist that rose and fell aimlessly, and what she felt was as blurred as the desk and the letters that she frowned at in front of her. Then her hand reached out suddenly for the letter propped against the books at the back of the desk. She hadn't seen the letter before, though it was in plain view. Therese tore it open. This was the letter Carol had meant. It was a long letter, and the ink was pale blue on some pages and dark on others, and there were words crossed out. She read the first page, then went back and read it again.

  Monday

  My darling,

  I am not even going into court. This morning I was given a private showing of what Harge intended to bring against me. Yes, they have a few conversations recorded—namely Waterloo, and it would be useless to try to face a court with this. I should be ashamed, not for myself oddly enough, but for my own child, to say nothing of not wanting you to have to appear. Everything was very simple this morning—I simply surrendered. The important thing now is what I intend to do in the future, the lawyers said. On this depends whether I would ever see my child again, because Harge has with ease now complete custody of her. The question was would I stop seeing you (and others like you, they said!). It was not so clearly put. There were a dozen faces that opened their mouths and spoke like the judges of doomsday—reminding me of my duties, my position, and my future. (What future have they fixed up for me? Are they going to look in on it in six months?)—I said I would stop seeing you. I wonder if you will understand, Therese, since you are so young and never even knew a mother who cared desperately for you. For this promise, they present me with their wonderful reward, the privilege of seeing my child a few weeks of the year. Hours later— Abby is here. We talk of you—she sends you her love as I send mine. Abby reminds me of the things I know already—that you are very young and you adore me. Abby does not think I should send this to you, but tell you when you come. We have just had quite an argument about it. I tell her she does not know you as well as I, and I think now she does not know me as well as you in some ways, and those ways are the emotions. I am not very happy today, my sweet. I am drinking my ryes and you would tell me they depress me, I know. But I wasn't prepared for these days after those weeks with you. They were happy weeks—you knew it more than I did. Though all we have known is only a beginning. I meant to try to tell you in this letter that you don't even know the rest and perhaps you never will and are not supposed to—meaning destined to. We never fought, never came back knowing there was nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together. Did you ever care for me that much, I don't know. But that is all part of it and all we have known is only a beginning. And it has been such a short time. For that reason it will have shorter roots in you. You say you love me however I am and when I curse. I say I l
ove you always, the person you are and the person you will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything to those people or possibly change anything, because those are not the words I am afraid of. I mean, darling, I shall send you this letter and I think you will understand why I do, why I told the lawyers yesterday I would not see you again and why I had to tell them that, and I would be underestimating you to think you could not and to think you would prefer delay.

  She stopped reading and stood up, and walked slowly to her writing table.

  Yes, she understood why Carol had sent the letter. Because Carol loved her child more than her. And because of that, the lawyers had been able to break her, to force her to do exactly what they wanted her to do.

  Therese could not imagine Carol forced. Yet here it was in Carol's writing. It was a surrender. Therese knew no situation in which she was the stake could have wrested her from Carol. For an instant there came the fantastic realization that Carol had devoted only a fraction of herself to her, Therese, and suddenly the whole world of the last month, like a tremendous lie, cracked and almost toppled. In the next instant, Therese did not believe that. Yet the fact remained, she had chosen her child.