Nothing That Meets the Eye

by Patricia Highsmith

  “You should not get so excited, Agnes,” remarked Mrs. Steinach.

  “Oh, Moth-aw!” Agnes laughed a little wildly, aware that she had not felt such exuberance in months. “Do you suppose Margaret has changed much, Moth-aw?”

  “I wouldn’t wonder, after three years.” Mrs. Steinach inclined her head as the delivery boy of Reed’s Grocery rode by on his bicycle, tipping his cap. A gray, very small woman, Mrs. Steinach sat as bolt upright as the car seat itself in order to see through the windshield. She looked straight ahead with her habitually preoccupied and somewhat worried ­expression.

  “I don’t think Margaret will think I’ve changed much, do you?” Agnes widened her eyes like a child at her mother, but in fact her eyes most of all gave away her thirty-five years. They were surrounded by a fine mesh of wrinkles that made the eyes themselves look like a pair of strange, semitransparent, blue-violet colored fish, caught up in nets. Wavy tresses of black hair made her pallor striking. The even whiteness of her face suggested the purifying effects of raging fever.

  “No, indeed, child,” Mrs. Steinach said indulgently.

  “You don’t sound at all excited, Moth-aw.”

  “We turn here, don’t we?”

  The Pierce Arrow rounded the corner onto Washington Avenue and proceeded toward the railroad station. The car moved rigidly and at moderate speed as though it were part of a funeral cortege. They were on their way to meet Agnes’s sister Margaret, a music teacher who was bringing a student from a San Francisco conservatory to New York. Her letter two days before had said she would have the weekend free to spend with them in Evanston.

  But the train from San Francisco was two hours late. Agnes’s smile fell away until her mouth, which she rouged heavily, was nothing but soft curves expressive of a petulant sadness. Her great violet eyes stretched wide at the information clerk as though he had done her a personal wrong out of some personal malice.

  Mrs. Steinach, on the other hand, accepted the situation with a little “Oh” and remarked they had best go home and come again at five o’clock. It would give Agnes an opportunity to rest, she said. It would be quite a strain on her, the two drives and company, too.

  “But Moth-aw, I’ve never felt so gloriously well in my life!”

  Even outdoors her voice sounded as hollow, as capable of echoes and as much like an echo itself as it did in their quiet old house. It slid around high in the treble register like an affected falsetto, or like the tone of a bent saw struck with a rubber hammer.

  Back they went, and the willows welcomed the Pierce Arrow as fondly as if its mission had been successful.

  Mowgli, the big white Angora, fled nervously from the corner of the sofa when Agnes and her mother entered the living room. Mowgli had been stone deaf since before his prime, which perhaps aggravated his sense of disturbance at the sight of activity. Halfway up the stairs he waited for Agnes or her mother to come and stroke him so he might return with dignity, but today neither of them noticed him.

  “Are you sure she said three o’clock, Moth-aw?”

  Agnes ignored her mother’s ignoring of her—Mrs. Steinach was on the way back to the kitchen—and ran upstairs to make sure once more that the silver thermos in the guest room, which was to be Klett’s, was filled with ice water, that the nosegay of little flowers in her father’s shaving mug was still fresh, that the not always reliable thermostat promised hot water in case he wanted to shave. Men always wanted very hot water, especially in the mornings. But wouldn’t it be funny if Klett were too young to shave after all? Margaret’s letter had said he was only eighteen.

  The guest room was in perfect order, the writing desk opened, its glass inkpot filled, the counterpane newly ironed so its lace ruffles would look their crispest. With the shades up, the wallpaper of cream and tiny royal blue flowers looked really very bright and attractive. There was firewood and kindling ready, though the temperature was just a bit warm for a fire.

  “Mr-row?” Mowgli had followed her to the threshold, curious that the room had been opened. His mouth was soft and sad, one of his blue eyes cast. He stared at his mistress with an air of bewilderment and sullen madness.

  Agnes floated to the window like a dancer, holding her arms as though they trailed a diaphanous material. She held back a limp brocade curtain and gazed down onto the row of willows, onto the smooth gravel driveway that was itself beautiful, the corner of the front lawn bordered with a few violets that waved like tattered flags in the breeze. And the willows? They were like a forest of little yellow and green barber poles, twisting up and then untwisting. Or were they more like a cluster of champagne fountains? How sweet it would all look to Margaret! And with a vicarious thrill she imagined Klett’s first glimpse of their home. Modestly sized as it was, compared to others in the block, everything about it reflected perfect taste. The living room, in which pale blue velvet predominated, certainly invited one to relax in soft comfort and forget all life’s difficulties. She felt everyone of sensibility should detect in an instant the particular personality of her home, as a connoisseur detects a special vintage of wine. And of course Klett would be such a person, perhaps in fact a genius. Their two pianos in the living room would delight him, though they were a little out of tune. Possibly he and she would play something together. It had been many years since she had played duets with Margaret, many more since she and her father had played. Would Klett be handsome and fiery like Chopin? she wondered. Or would he be moody and somber like a young Beethoven?

  Her eyes strayed through the willows to the moving blotch on the Carstairses’ front walk. It was a man in a gray suit leading a small child by the hand. A kind of weight gathered and fell quietly inside her, and the diffused sadness in her eyes was focused by a look of fear. She remembered the day Billy Carstairs had been playing on his front lawn and she had invited him into the house for a glass of lemonade and told him a story about his dead father that had made his eyes grow big and his face white. The story had been absolutely false. She still remembered her thrill when Billy had begun to cry. She had made him promise he would never tell anyone, and she had felt she had control over him. But since that day Billy had avoided her on the street. And when he married and his child was born, Agnes had felt deep inside herself a kind of personal defeat. Now she hated it when she saw him with his silly-looking blond wife or with his child.

  “Ag-ness?”

  “Yes, Moth-aw!”

  “Shouldn’t you like a cup of tea?”

  Agnes thought at first that her mother was going to bring it up, but of course she was not in bed now! And she did not feel weak or ill at all—just the least bit weak perhaps. She folded her hands behind her and leaned against the window jamb. “I’ll be down immediately, Moth-aw!”

  The hollow, falsetto voice, strong as a singer’s, found its way into the varnished hall, down the short wide staircase, into the living room, where her mother poured tea into two flared white cups. Agnes glided down the steps almost, it seemed, before her voice had ceased to echo.

  Then a car door slammed, and Agnes turned startled eyes to the front door. “They’re here!—Oh, Moth-aw, you go!”

  The door opened and Margaret almost toppled her mother with her embrace. “Mummy!—Agnie, you look splendid, darling!” she shouted over her mother’s shoulder.

  “Margaret, my angel!” Agnes held open her arms, curving her long fingers upward. She felt she could have wept.

  “This is Klett. Klett Buchanan,” Margaret said, smiling at the boy who had crept inside the door with the couple of suitcases. “Klett, my mother and my sister Agnes.”

  Agnes felt a sensation almost like one of recognition. He was so exactly what she had hoped, handsome, intense, with an air of distinction already, though his face was round as a child’s.

  “How do you do?” he said with a quick bow and a smile, showing even and rather girlish teeth. He w
as slight and not very tall and wore a plaid muffler tightly buttoned in by a gray and green Tyrolean-style jacket. He looked from one to another of the three with an air of being eager to please.

  “How do you do?” whispered Agnes, last of all.

  “Just in time for tea, how nice!” Margaret said, dropping her coat into a chair. “I know Klett’s even hungrier than I am. They compromised by not taking on a diner and got us here fairly on time after all.”

  They discussed the trains, the vain trip to the station, while Margaret buttered and marmaladed triangles of toast for everyone. Klett sat beside her in Mowgli’s corner of the powder-blue sofa, holding his teacup stiffly.

  “Tell us about yourself, Margaret.” Mrs. Steinach’s face had grown much happier since Margaret’s arrival. “It’s so seldom we hear from you.”

  “Oh, I’m just the same, I guess. My work now is more organizing than teaching. I pick the best for Moore’s classes and grade them down. I told you about Moore. Then when I find someone like Klett, I recommend him as a special student. Only this time I mean to do some research work on my own in New York.” She looked suddenly at Agnes, who was not listening, then back at her mother. Her face with its strong nose lacked the regularity of Agnes’s, but it was attractively frank and open, like a vigorous major chord itself. At thirty-eight she was still beautiful, even when she forgot to apply makeup, as she often did. “Oh, all that’s dull. You don’t look a day older, you know, Mummy. And the house ­hasn’t changed a bit, has it?”

  “But however did you find Klett?” Agnes interrupted gaily, feeling Klett with his musical ear must be noticing her voice, which had wider range, was more feminine than Margaret’s. “I do wish you’d play something for us. Only”—she caught her breath—“it’s too early, isn’t it?”

  “Much too early.” Margaret gazed affectionately at Klett as he circled the two baby grand pianos set curve to curve in the corner of the room. “I didn’t mention those, Klett. I’m sure they’re horribly out of tune.”

  “Oh!” Agnes gasped, shocked at Margaret’s bluntness, but no one seemed to hear the gasp.

  “Do you play?” Klett asked her.

  Agnes smiled up at him. “After a fashion. Oh, but music is the joy of my life!” She wished he would ask her to play something now. She had been practicing a Chopin nocturne until she was sure it was perfect. “How wonderful it must be to be master of an instrument at eighteen!”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Steinach put in.

  Klett lowered his smooth face modestly.

  “Klett’s not quite a master, though he might get there if he works.” Margaret extended another toast and marmalade to him. “Here, Klett.”

  Agnes laughed nervously. “Why you talk to him like a dog, ­Margaret!”

  “Do I? He bears up,” she said with a smile. “Mummy, you’re sure it won’t be too much trouble to put us up until Monday morning?”

  “Why, of course not!” Agnes cried. “What a question!”

  Only two or three chords had sounded, but each sent a thrill over her. How strange and personal it felt to know that other hands were on her piano!

  “You have the most beautiful touch!” she whispered into the mirror. She drew the very soft ivory-backed brush across her black hair once more, letting some of it lie over her shoulders.

  She tiptoed down the hall, down the stairs, bending a little so she might sooner see the lighted corner of the room where the pianos were. Middle C sounded, firmly held down.

  “Oh!”

  “Come on down, Agnie!” Margaret called from where she stood at Agnes’s piano. “Klett’s upstairs washing for supper.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly she felt she almost hated Margaret.

  “You’re looking so much better than I’d expected, Agnes. Really, I’m delighted. Mummy’s last letter said you’d had more of those pains in the back and had already been in bed a week.”

  “I’ve just spent five days in bed,” Agnes explained.

  “Did you write that lumbar specialist I told you about in Chicago?”

  “Oh, yes,” Agnes replied wearily. “I don’t know, I just don’t know. There’ve been so many specialists. Sometimes I think all they do is take one’s money and go off. And who knows? Who knows? Pain is just my cross, darling!”

  “How’s your sleeping?”

  “I sleep when I can,” she said with a cheerful laugh.

  Seated on the end of the bench, Margaret ran her fingers again over a few notes, sounded them together, but Agnes took no pleasure in them now. “The trouble is, I suppose, if one’s in bed all day one simply isn’t tired at night. You have gained weight, though, haven’t you?”

  “Perhaps. So have you!” Agnes made herself smile. Margaret had put on tons. It was really disgusting.

  “I suppose I have.” Margaret smiled. “Bad as the year I was married. But I must say I feel better for it.”

  Agnes remembered how she had gained pounds when she married, being so happy, happy like a pig with her Austrian musicologist, Dr. Hermann von Haffner. But then of course the divorce had come only two years later. Agnes pressed her palms together, twisted them. “Do ask Klett to come down and play something before supper, Margaret. I think he’s perfectly charming!”

  “All right. I did want to warn you, Agnie, not to make too much over Klett. He’s a very conceited young man and it goes right to his head.”

  “Oh—did I?” She found a mischievous amusement in the fact she might have.

  “Not seriously.” Margaret frowned with a look of humor in her eyes, in an old habit Agnes remembered. “He’s from a small school where he’s had too much praising already. He could develop into a good or a mediocre musician, but at this stage a swelled head won’t help.”

  “Oh! Well—” Agnes laughed a little. “I’ll ask him to come down.”

  She went upstairs to the door at the end of the hall. She heard the snap of a suitcase closing. How exciting it was to have a guest!

  “Come in?” he responded to her knock.

  She opened the door slowly, smiling. He wore the same Tyrolean jacket, but with a dark blue and red silk scarf knotted at his throat instead of the muffler. His light brown hair was damp from his washing, and the wavy rise of hair over his forehead was higher and bore fresh marks of his comb. What a handsome figure he makes in this room that has been silent so long, she thought. She loved his clothes. They reminded her of a conception she had long entertained of Frédéric Chopin. She loved, too, his air of aloofness and nervous impatience that could alternate so quickly with boyish uncertainty. The only thing he was yet certain of, she supposed, was his genius. He gazed back at her now, however, with perfect composure in his gentle, intense face. His slightly parted lips held the merest beginning of an involuntary smile. Surely he understood that she understood him, she thought, and felt a tingling shock pass over her.

  “Won’t you come down and play something for us?” she asked finally.

  He bowed a little. “It would be a pleasure, Miss Steinach.” He moved to the mirror, touched the side of his head with his palm, then followed her out of the room.

  To Agnes’s annoyance, Margaret was still at the piano, but she got up as they crossed the room.

  “This one’s the best. The other’s way out of tune,” Margaret said, for Klett had stopped near her father’s darker piano. “Well, I’ll leave you two. I’m in need of a quick nap.”

  The better piano, thought Agnes, but Margaret’s very utterance had offended her most. How could she talk so callously about the piano their father had cherished?

  “Beautiful instruments,” Klett remarked, feeling the surface of her father’s piano with the backs of his fingers.

  Agnes’s Baldwin and her father’s Steinway, except for their want of tuning due to Agnes’s basic unmusicalness and consequent neglect, were
monuments of judicious care and handling, like the Pierce Arrow Otto Steinach had bought in 1927. Their wax and polish lusters were unbroken by a single scratch, the almost black one of the father, Agnes’s of lighter brown mahogany streaked with dark, much like the coat of a tiger-striped cat. Even from some distance in the closed room they gave off the bouquet that pianos, of all musical instruments, seem to possess so richly, of aromatic polish, of felt and steel and a certain dusky sweetness like the piano’s versatile music itself. A taffeta-shaded lamp stood on either piano atop a swirled scarf. The scarf over Agnes’s was a gloomily colored Persian print, over her father’s a heavy and ancient-looking rep of beige fringed with stiffened gilt that looked rather military. Their tops suggested half-conjoined wheels of chance in motion, the black and white keyboards parts of their numbered rims, or so Agnes had often thought when she and her father seated themselves facing each other to play their duets, their Bach and Haydn double concertos, their Chopin “treble and basses.” She had seemed to be caught in the centrifugal force of their repertory even before they touched the keys, she remembered. But now as Klett sat down at her piano, she felt only a simple joy that his young genius was about to be expressed on the piano she knew so well.

  She looked down at her hands, which she had arranged carefully in her lap, one with palm up, the other lightly at rest upon it, its smooth knuckleless fingers flowing down to oval pale lavenderish nails. Klett was quickly spanning off keys without pressing them, like a musician before a concert, but a tremulous excitement prompted Agnes to interrupt.

  “I’m so fortunate in having long fingers. I suppose I should play much better than I do.”

  Klett looked at her hands. “It doesn’t really matter about the length, you know. Yours might be too flexible.”

  Agnes’s face fell. “I can play two notes beyond an octave.”

  He shrugged. “I can just reach an octave.” He held up his right hand, turned it front and back objectively. “My hands are supposed to be the best type.”

  Agnes watched his hands come together on the keys, the fingers striking with precision, like arched hammers. He had rather unattractive hands, she thought, not at all what she considered a pianist’s hands should be. They were short and squarish and their backs round with muscle. Then, aware that he was playing something, she forced herself to listen. “Bach!” she said.