The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

  He listened, somewhat irritated, to her story of Rita at the bank. Rita was a teller who was always late coming back from lunch, which meant that Jenny had to stand duty for her and consequently lose time on her own lunch hour, which came afterward. Jenny didn’t complain. On the contrary she always laughed about it, and now she was laughing because the boss, Mr. Stoddard, had asked her to lunch with him yesterday, and she hadn’t been able to go out until Rita got back, which had annoyed Mr. Stoddard, and he had spoken to Rita when she finally came back, loaded with shopping bags, about taking more than an hour for lunch.

  Greg folded his arms. Jenny’s silly job wasn’t going to last much longer, anyway. Maybe until February, maybe until March, when they got married. “How come Mr. Stoddard asked you out to lunch? I’m not sure I like that.”

  “Oh, come on-n. He’s forty-two!”

  “Married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t know, because I don’t care.”

  “Was it the first time he asked you?”

  Greg didn’t know what else to say about it, so he said nothing. After a moment, he got up to leave. He kissed her tenderly, standing by the kitchen door. “Don’t forget to lock this door. I locked the front one.”

  “I will.”

  “It won’t be long till Christmas.” They were going to his family in Philadelphia Christmas Eve and to hers in Scranton for Christmas Day.

  “Another Christmas,” she said, smiling and sighing, and in a tone that might have meant anything.

  “You’re tired. Sleep well. G’night, honey.” He dashed out the door, nearly fell on the dark steps, groped and found the handle of his car door.

  Jenny did not go to bed for nearly an hour. She straightened up the kitchen very slowly, putting all the dishes back after she had washed them. She was not thinking about anything. Sometimes the most interesting thoughts, the most pleasurable thoughts, came when she was not trying to think about anything. Tonight she felt tired and very content. The only pleasurable thought that came to her was like a vision or a picture: brilliantly colored fish like goldfish, only larger and more red, swam through a most beautiful underwater forest of herblike plants. The sand was golden yellow as if the sun struck through the water all the way to the bottom of the sea. It was a gentle and noiseless picture, good to fall asleep by. She saw it again when she closed her eyes in bed.

  3

  Robert had hoped for a letter Saturday from Nickie or from her lawyer, but nothing at all came Saturday. He took his shirts and sheets to the laundry, picked up a suit at the cleaner’s, sat in the antiquated Langley library reading for an hour or so, and walked back to his apartment with a novel of John O’Hara’s and a biography of Franz Schubert, whom for some odd reason he had been thinking about that morning. From two until after four, he drew Collembola, members of the springtail family. One of Professor Gumbolowski’s sketches of Collembola protura was quite entertaining, no doubt unintentionally. The two front legs of the insect were drawn up in the manner of a dancing bullfighter about to plunge his banderillas into a bull. Robert amused himself by making a separate drawing on a postcard of the protura with bullfighting knee pants on its stocky legs, a triangular cap, and gaily tasseled darts in its hands. He sent it off to Edna and Peter Campbell with a note: “Making fine progress! Love to you both, Bob.”

  What he wanted to do was drive by the girl’s house again. He had not been to her house in six days now, and Wednesday last, or maybe it was Tuesday, when he had resisted an impulse to go, he had sworn he wouldn’t go again. It was a perilous thing to do. God, if Nickie ever found out! How she’d laugh and shriek and jeer! He felt he should thank his luck he hadn’t been discovered so far, and that he should quit it. Yet it affected him exactly in the way liquor did alcoholics, he thought, people who swore off and went back to the bottle. Maybe it was because nothing else filled his life, there was nothing attractive around him now except the girl called Thierolf. That was what people said about alcoholics, that they had nothing more interesting to fill their lives with, so they drank. What he felt, slowly walking his room at six-ten of a Saturday evening, was temptation. It wasn’t impossible for him to resist it, he assured himself. Go to a rotten movie, if necessary. Or be stronger, have some dinner somewhere, then come back and read this evening. Write the Campbells a letter and ask them to come down some weekend. He couldn’t put them up, but the Putnam Inn wasn’t a bad little hotel. Get the girl out of your mind. Crazy things like spying on a girl in her house couldn’t be considered conducive to an orderly life. Or to mental health. Robert laughed a little. It was going against doctor’s orders.

  Now it was dark. Six-eighteen. He turned on his radio for some news.

  He sat on his couch half listening to the abbreviated news items and debating whether to go again tonight or not. For the last time. Maybe she wouldn’t be there, since it was Saturday evening. Robert was aware that part of his brain was arguing like a suddenly eloquent orator who had jumped to his feet after being silent a long while: “What’s the matter with going one more time? You haven’t been caught up to now. What’s so serious if she does see you? You don’t look like a psychopath.” (Second voice: “Do psychopaths necessarily look like psychopaths? Certainly not.”) “Anyway, you don’t care if you’re caught or seen. What’ve you got to lose? Isn’t that what you’re always saying?” The orator sat down. No, that wasn’t what he was always saying, and he would care if he were seen by the girl. And yet to stay home that evening seemed like death, a slow and quiet death, and to see the girl again was life. And which side are you on, Robert Forester? And why was it so hard to live?

  Off a main road out of Langley, he took a two-lane, badly paved road which was a shortcut to Humbert Corners. There was not a single street light along the road, and since the few private houses he passed were set far back, it seemed that he drove himself through a world of solid night. He went at a speed below thirty-five miles per hour, as he had constantly to avoid potholes. At Humbert Corners, he made a jog, turning right at the bank building with its red-and-blue mailbox on the corner, continuing on up a hill so steep he had to shift to second gear. At last came the dark house with white shutters on the left, which meant that the lane where he always left his car was three-tenths of a mile farther. He slowed and dimmed his lights, until he was driving by parking lights alone. He pulled some thirty feet into the lane, stopped and got out, then reached in the door pocket of his car for his flashlight. He used the flashlight at intervals on the road, mainly to see where to step out of the way of a passing car, though few cars had ever passed when he had been here.

  There was a light at the front side window, the living-room window, and one at the back, in the kitchen. Robert walked slowly, thinking even now that he could turn back, and knowing he would go on. Faintly, he heard classical music from the house—not Schubert, which had first come to his mind. He thought it was a symphony of Schumann’s. He went quickly past the glow of the living-room window, went round the basketball goal, then toward the small trees behind the house. He had hardly reached the trees when the kitchen door opened and steps sounded on the wooden porch. The girl’s steps, he was sure of that. She turned in the direction of the basketball board. She was carrying a big basket. A white muffler blew out behind her in the wind. She set the basket down, and he realized she was going to burn trash in the wire basket that was slightly behind and to the left of the driveway. In the wind, it took her a minute or so to make the paper catch. Then the flame was going, lighting up her face. She was facing him, staring down at the fire. Perhaps thirty feet separated them. She took the basket and emptied the rest of it onto the fire, and the flame went so high she had to step back. Still, she stared at the fire with the absent fascination he had seen on her face many times when she paused in something she was doing in the kitchen.

  Then suddenly she lifted her eyes and she was looking directly at him. Her lips parted and she dropped the basket.
She stood rigid.

  In an involuntary gesture of surrender and apology, Robert opened his arms. “Good evening,” he said.

  The girl gasped and seemed on the brink of running, though she did not move.

  Robert took one step toward her. “My name is Robert Forester,” he said automatically and clearly.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  Robert was silent, motionless also, one foot advanced for a step he did not dare to take.

  “Are you a neighbor?”

  “Not exactly. I live in Langley.” Robert felt he had to throw himself at her mercy, and if he found none, then that was that. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Robert said, still holding his arms a little out from his sides. “Would you like to go into your house?”

  But the girl didn’t move. She seemed to be trying to fix his face in her memory, but the fire had died down now. The darkness was thickening between them. And Robert no longer stood in the light of the kitchen window.

  “Just stand there,” she said.

  “All right.”

  She walked slowly, leaving her basket, watching him all the while. And Robert, so that she could keep him in view, moved forward so that he passed the corner of the house. The girl stood on the little porch with her hand on the knob of her door.

  “Your name is what?”

  “Robert Forester. I suppose you’re going to call the police.”

  She bit her underlip, then said, “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  The doorknob squeaked in her hand, but she did not open the door.

  “I suppose you want to call the police. Go ahead and call them. I’ll wait.” He moved so that he was in the faint light that came from the kitchen’s side window, and he looked calmly at the girl. It was all fitting, he thought—letting himself be seen on a night when he had sworn not to come, standing in a fire’s glow when he might easily have stepped back in the dark at the other side of the house, then promising the girl he’d wait for the police.

  “I don’t want to call the police,” she said softly and earnestly, in a way he had seen her but never heard her talk, “but I don’t want a prowler around my house. If I could be sure you’d never bother me again—”

  Robert smiled a little. “You can be sure.” He was glad to be able to promise her something. “I’m very sorry that I’ve frightened you before. Very sorry. I—” His unplanned words came to a halt.

  The girl shivered in the cold. She did not take her eyes from his face, but now her eyes did not look frightened, only intense and puzzled. “What were you going to say?”

  “I would like to apologize. I liked—I liked to watch you in the kitchen. Cooking. Hanging curtains. I’m not trying to explain. I can’t. But I don’t want you to be afraid. I’m not a criminal. I was lonely and depressed and I watched a girl in a kitchen. Do you see?” In her silence, he felt she didn’t see, couldn’t. And who could? His teeth chattered. His body felt cool from sweat. “I don’t expect you to understand that. I don’t expect you to excuse it. I simply want to try to explain and I can’t. I’m sure I can’t, because I don’t know the real reason myself. Not the real reason.” He moistened his cold lips. The girl would scorn him now. He could never think of her again without also thinking of the fact she knew him and despised him. “Perhaps you should go in. It’s so cold.”

  “It’s snowing,” said the girl in a surprised tone.

  Robert turned his head quickly toward the driveway, saw that little flakes were coming down, then a smile pulled at his mouth. The snow seemed absurd, and to mention it now, more absurd. “Good night, Miss Thierolf. Goodbye.”

  “Wait.”

  He turned around.

  She was standing facing him, her hand no longer on the doorknob. “If you’re depressed—I don’t think you should be more depressed because of—because I—”

  He understood. “Thank you.”

  “Depressions can be awful. They’re like a disease. They can make people go out of their minds.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  “I hope you don’t get too depressed,” she added.

  “I hope you’re never depressed,” he said as if he were making a wish. An unnecessary wish, he thought.

  “Oh, I have been. Three years ago. But not lately, thank goodness.”

  The slow, emphatic way she said the last words made him feel less tense. She had said them in a tone she might have used to someone she had known a long while. He did not want to leave her.

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked. She opened the door, went in, and held the door for him.

  He went toward her, too stunned for the moment to do anything else. He walked into the kitchen.

  She took off her coat and the white muffler and hung them in a small closet by the door, glancing at him over her shoulder as if she were still a bit afraid.

  He was standing in the middle of the floor.

  “I just thought it was silly, if we were talking, to stand out in the cold,” she said.

  He nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Do you want to take off your coat? Would you like some coffee? I just made this.”

  He took off his overcoat, folded it inside out, and laid it across the back of a straight chair by the door. “Thank you very much, but I’ve stopped drinking coffee. It’s apt to keep me awake.” He stared at her in an unbelieving way, at her soft hair so close to him now, only six feet away, at her gray eyes—they had flecks of blue in them. Here, so near he could touch them, were the white curtains he had seen her put up, the oven door he had seen her so often bend to open. And something else struck him: his pleasure or satisfaction in seeing her more closely now was no greater than when he had looked at her through the window, and he foresaw that getting to know her even slightly would be to diminish her and what she stood for to him—happiness and calmness and the absence of any kind of strain.

  She was heating the glass percolator of coffee. As she watched it, she turned her head to look at him two or three times. “I suppose you think I’m insane, asking you to come in,” she said, “but after a couple of minutes, I wasn’t afraid of you at all. Are you from around here?”

  “I’m from New York.”

  “Really? I’m from Scranton. I’ve only been up here four months.” She poured a cup of coffee.

  And what brought you, he started to say. But he didn’t even care to know. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “May I?”

  “Oh, of cour-rse.” She shook her head at his offer of a cigarette. “Do you have a job in Langley?”

  “Yes. I work at Langley Aeronautics. For the last three months. I live at the Camelot Apartments.”

  “Why’d you leave New York? I should think—”

  “I wanted a change. A change of scene.”

  “That’s my only reason, too. I was earning more in Scranton. Everyone thought I was crazy leaving my job, but I was living at home and I thought I was getting pretty o-old for that,” she said with a shy smile.

  He was surprised, surprised to silence by her naïveté. When she drawled certain words, it was not for effect, but rather the way a child might drawl words, by accident or from habit. She must be in her early twenties, he thought, but she was like a girl much younger, an adolescent.

  She carried her coffee to the gate-leg table and set it on a dark-blue place mat. “Here’s an ashtray,” she said, pushing one on the table a couple of inches toward him. “Don’t you want to sit down?”

  “Thank you.” He sat down in the straight chair opposite her. Immediately, he wanted to get up again, to leave. He was ashamed, and he did not want the girl to see his shame. As soon as he finished the cigarette, he thought, he would go. He looked at her long, relaxed hand gently stirring her coffee with a teaspoon.

  “Do you believe in strange encounters?”

  He looked at her face. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—accidents, I guess. Like my meeting you tonight. They�
��re in all great books. Well, not all, I suppose, but a lot of them. People who meet by accident are destined to meet. It’s so much more important than being introduced to someone, because that’s just a matter of someone else knowing them already and introducing you to them. I met Greg—he’s my fiancé—through Rita, at the bank where I work, but some of my closest friends I’ve met by accident.” She spoke slowly and steadily.

  “You mean—you believe in fate.”

  “Of course. And people represent things.” Her eyes looked distant and sad.

  “Yes,” he agreed vaguely, thinking that she had certainly represented something to him before he ever spoke to her. But now? She did not seem to have the wisdom, the common sense, perhaps, that he had attributed to her when he watched her through the window. “And what do I represent to you?”

  “I don’t know yet. But something. I’ll know soon. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.” She lifted her coffee cup at last and sipped. “The time I was depressed, there was a stranger in the house, a friend of my father’s staying with us a few days. I didn’t like him, and I felt he represented death. Then a week after he left, my little brother came down with spinal meningitis and then he died.”