Nothing That Meets the Eye

by Patricia Highsmith

  The gray-breasted parakeet eyed him suspiciously and sulked, dumb, on his perch.

  Mr. McKenny had seen in the dime store that he was a sullen little fellow, but he had been the only one today with a gray breast. “Bil-ly,” Mr. McKenny said slowly and distinctly. “Bil-ly . . . Bil-ly . . .” Very slowly he filled the water cup in the cage from a little pitcher and dropped a few seeds into the feeding trough to show his goodwill. Then he stood behind the closet door, out of sight of the bird and yet only a yard away from him. When teaching a parakeet to say something, it was better to stand out of sight so the bird had the minimum of distraction and could concentrate on imitating the sound it heard. “Bil-ly,” Mr. McKenny said slowly. “Bil-ly . . . Bil-ly . . . Bil-ly . . .”

  “Bi-eee!” chirped Queenie, a mischievous, spoiled green hen in a cage with her mate across the room.

  Mr. McKenny began again, patiently. “Bil-ly. . . . Say something, Billy. Kiss me. Kiss me. Kiss me.” If he could hit on a phrase a parakeet knew, it sometimes stimulated further talk. But this bird probably did not know a single word.

  “Tin-ng! Rrrrr-rrrr-r!” the parakeet said finally.

  Mr. McKenny sighed. If he was not mistaken, that was the parakeet’s attempt to imitate the sound of a cash register.

  The telephone rang, and Mr. McKenny left his position behind the closet door to answer it.

  “Hello, Mr. McKenny?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Jack Haley of the Evening Star. I understand you returned a lost parakeet named Chou-Chou to a Mrs. Richard Van der Maur yes­terday?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. McKenny, very much on his guard.

  “We’d like to get an interview with you. You know, tell us how you captured the bird and all that. Could I—”

  “Well, thank you, but there’s nothing to tell. The bird flew onto my windowsill, I started talking to it and it hopped in, and that was that.”

  “Just a little story and maybe a photograph,” the reporter begged. “It’ll just take a few minutes. I’ll be over in about a quarter of an hour.”

  “Oh, please—”

  But the reporter had hung up.

  Mr. McKenny spent the quarter of an hour trying to tidy his one-and-one-half-room bachelor apartment, and debating at the same time whether to run out and just not be here when the reporter arrived. Should he hide the eleven parakeets he had? He could put the four cages in the closet with covers over them and the birds would be silent. Or should he display them boldly and say that he had been a parakeet fancier for years? Two minutes before the reporter was due, Mr. McKenny decided on the former course. He set the cages on the floor of his closet atop shoes and a soiled shirt, and closed the door. He wondered if the reporter had heard any parakeets in the background when he telephoned. Well, he’d assume that he hadn’t.

  The doorbell rang.

  After a final glance around and a tug at his vest, Mr. McKenny went bravely to his kitchenette and pushed the release button. He heard quick, youthful footsteps on the two flights of stairs, then a knock. Mr. McKenny opened the door.

  “Good morning! Mr. McKenny?” The young man smiled. He had a tablet and pencil in his hand and a camera around his neck.

  “Yes,” Mr. McKenny said. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Thank you. Is this the window the bird flew in?”

  “No. This one,” said Mr. McKenny, pointing.

  The questions came fast. How long had it taken him to coax the bird onto his finger? Had he immediately looked in the papers to see if a parakeet had been lost?

  Mr. McKenny told his story with an economy of detail and in a disparaging manner. “After all, a thing like this is bound to happen once in a while in a city as big as New York. Where else can a parakeet go except into somebody’s window? They’re friendly little birds, you know, and they get hungry often. They’d either pick somebody’s window or fly straight into a restaurant.” Mr. McKenny managed a laugh.

  “Still, you made Mrs. Van der Maur very happy, Mr. McKenny. Lots of people would have kept the bird and not bothered to try and return it to the owner. Mrs. Van der Maur called up last night to cancel her ad, and she took the trouble to tell us she was delighted with the fast results. I went over to see her this morning, got a picture of the parakeet and so forth. She sure was happy to have it back. Now, how about a shot of you here sitting by the window where you caught it?” The young man opened his camera.

  “I’m rather camera-shy,” Mr. McKenny said.

  “Aw, come on. Just a little picture for our second section.”

  Reluctantly, Mr. McKenny sat down in the straight chair the reporter had pulled near the window.

  “Now stick your finger out the way you did for the bird and look at me as if you’re talking to me. Tell me what happened again.”

  “I was—the parakeet was right here on the brick part—”

  Click!

  Mr. McKenny started to get up.

  “Just one more, please, in case the first one doesn’t turn out.”

  “—on the brick part, when I—”

  Click!

  “Thank you, sir. Do you know a lot about parakeets? Have you any pets of your own?”

  “No,” Mr. McKenny said. “I used to. Not anymore. Parakeets, I mean. I suppose that’s why I was able to get this one to come in the room.”

  “Um-hm. May I ask what business you’re in, what you do for a living?”

  “I’m retired. I was a civil engineer. I have a small pension.”

  “I see,” the young man said, writing. Then his eye fell on a row of seed boxes on a shelf against the wall. There were also some cuttlebones and a couple of plastic bird toys—a little horse on rockers and a round-bottomed clown that stayed upright however it was pushed. The reporter went closer. “You bought all this for the parakeet?”

  “Well—yes,” Mr. McKenny said. “I wanted to do the right thing for it. It didn’t like the first seed I gave it.”

  “You’re a very kind man, Mr. McKenny. And you only had the bird about three hours, didn’t you? From two o’clock when you caught it until you called Mrs. Van der Maur at five?”

  “That’s correct,” Mr. McKenny said.

  “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. McKenny. You’ll see your story in the afternoon edition. I hope you’ll like it. Good-bye.” He smiled and opened the door.

  “Please don’t make too much of it,” Mr. McKenny said.

  Douglas McKenny was a religious newspaper buyer. He bought the afternoon edition of the paper that had his picture and the parakeet story in it, and read it through with an effort at detachment, as if it weren’t really about him. Then he checked carefully. There was a notice about Billy, the same one he had seen in the early morning paper, but no new parakeets were lost. Just as well. He could spend the rest of the afternoon and evening on Billy. Billy was not easy to work with, but there was a twenty-dollar reward at stake—not so much as Mrs. Van der Maur’s thirty yesterday, but still worth trying for. And the notice about Billy said also that he was a children’s pet. Mr. McKenny liked to place birds in homes where there were children.

  For over thirty years, Mr. McKenny had been a parakeet lover and a parakeet breeder in a modest way. Up until a few years ago, parakeets had sold for at least five dollars apiece—and were not to be found in dime stores—and Mr. McKenny had been able to supplement his pension income and thus make a small living by breeding and selling them. Two of the birds he had at home, Freddie and Queenie, were the youngest of a couple of dynasties that went back to the time his wife Helen had been alive and even fairly young. In a sense, it was like keeping Helen with him in something more than his memory, having parakeets that were the offspring of offspring back to the many generations that Helen had known and loved. Mr. McKenny had had about forty parakeets in his apartment w
hen the market had taken a slump. He did not mind selling parakeets at a dollar ninety-eight instead of five dollars—he had given enough away to children and grown-ups on his block who couldn’t pay five dollars—but a dollar ninety-eight instead of five dollars meant simply that that much less money would come in to pay his rent and buy his food. And really by accident one day, because duplicity of that kind would not have popped into his head out of the blue, he had seen that ten dollars was being offered for the return of a parakeet that had escaped from its home in the Village, a parakeet whose colors were the same as those of a parakeet he happened to have. It had taken some courage for Mr. McKenny to go downtown to the people with his own bird and say that it had flown into his window. But when he had seen the family’s face light up at having their pet back, he had felt a little better. After all, parakeets looked very much alike to the average person, and more than likely the bird he had given them was a healthier specimen than the one they had lost. Later, Mr. McKenny had grown able to push his birds a bit. If the people looked doubtful at finding that their bird had forgotten its name or was speechless, Mr. McKenny would say that it had responded at home for him and that it was probably frightened from having just been on the subway. Very seldom were Mr. McKenny’s parakeets turned down, and when they were, he could always say, “Well, I guess it’s a coincidence that this bird flew in my window.” Naturally, he tried to avoid publicity. The reporter who had called on him that morning was the first who had ever crossed his threshold. Most of the time, if the people he brought birds to asked his name, he gave a false one. When he had called on Mrs. Van der Maur with a parakeet, a butler had asked his name, and he had been so surprised that he gave it without thinking.

  Mr. McKenny did not answer every lost parakeet notice, only about three out of five, but there was a notice in some paper nearly every day during the summer months. He took in on the average about twenty dollars a week. His pension amounted to another twenty-one dollars a week. On this he could just live.

  Billy was accepted the following afternoon by a rather dubious mother and a screaming, wildly happy trio of children. It was Billy, the children insisted, and the parakeet confirmed it by repeating, “Bu-eee! Bu-eee! Bu-eee!” though with an air of annoyance at the noise the children were making. The mother said she was almost positive Billy was a little bigger and also had a darker blue tail. Mr. McKenny did not insist.

  “Well, it could be that it isn’t Billy. I suppose there’re quite a few parakeets that take to the outdoors in such nice weather as this. Don’t take him if you don’t think he’s yours.”

  “He is Billy! It’s Billy!” the children yelled.

  “Tin-ng! Rrrrrr-rrrr-r!” the parakeet said.

  Mr. McKenny left with his ten-dollar reward. He was smiling a little as he walked up York Avenue and it was not because he was ten dollars the richer but because he was thinking of the faces of the three children. Suddenly he realized he was staring into the window of a pet shop. A cage of parakeets hung in an upper corner. One of the parakeets was almost entirely yellow. And there was the standard price fastened to the door of their cage: a dollar ninety-eight each. Mr. McKenny went in and bought the yellow bird with part of his ten dollars. If nobody advertised a missing yellow parakeet—and this yellow one would be hard to pass off as another bird—he would keep her himself.

  He lived in a brownstone house, one of about a dozen remaining on either side of the street, crowded in by several colossal apartment buildings. Mr. McKenny had seen all the apartment buildings go up—on the sites of brownstones that had come down—in the seventeen years that he had been living in his present apartment. He knew all his neighbors in the brownstones, that is, the ones who kept window boxes of geraniums and pots of begonias and spent a lot of time sitting at their windows looking out at the street, which was practically everybody. The street was full of elderly people, couples and widows and widowers, many of whom could barely make ends meet, Mr. McKenny knew. He supposed that he fared a little better than most of them. There was a woman in the next house whose husband had died two years ago, to whom Mr. McKenny took a pot of stew or chicken soup now and then when he had the money himself to make a big batch. Another old man, who was confined to a wheelchair, Mr. McKenny often took for outings, wheeling him around and around the block.

  Now, as Mr. McKenny walked down his block, three or four thin, veinous hands waved at him from behind morning glory vines and blossoming geraniums. It was June and a fine, bright day.

  “Hello, there, Mr. McKenny! Saw your picture in the paper yesterday. Say, you’re a celebrity!”

  “Not quite!” Mr. McKenny said, chuckling. “Hello, Mrs. Zabriskie,” he greeted another woman who was sitting on the cement parapet of her stoop. “How’re you?”

  “Afternoon, Mr. McKenny. What you got there? Another bird you found?”

  Mr. McKenny smiled. “Nope.” He lifted the tan paper bag casually. “Just bought myself a summer shirt.”

  June went by and most of July, bringing such hot, breezeless days that Mr. McKenny put his birdcages out on the fire escape in the early morning before the sun got there and made it too hot. He fixed a cold salmon mold, garnished it with hard-boiled eggs and lettuce, and took it to Mr. Tucker, the man who lived in a wheelchair. He brought ice cream a couple of times a week to the woman whose husband had died.

  One morning, as Mr. McKenny leaned out of his window to get his birds in out of the climbing sun, he saw a fine male parakeet of royal blue with touches of green perched on the rail of his fire escape. He knew at once that it was not one of his own, though he had now about twenty-five parakeets in readiness for the increased summer business. The parakeet looked at him brightly, then resumed its chattering and hopping along the rail. It was talking to the other parakeets, all of which were looking with interest at the free bird. Mr. McKenny called to the bird softly, his heart beating fast.

  “Fw-w! Fw-w! Here birdie, birdie, birdie,” he said gently, not moving from his position, which was bent at the waist, one hand on the top of Freddie and Queenie’s cage, the other hand on the windowsill. Then gradually he drew back, taking the cage with him into the room.

  The parakeet on the fire escape hopped and chattered as if he were amused.

  Mr. McKenny took every cage in. No use trying too hard with a loose parakeet. Either it would join the other birds in the room or it wouldn’t. Mr. McKenny crouched on the floor back of the birdcages and began to talk to the parakeet again. “Here, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie. Come on in. Aren’t you hungry? Tweetie, tweetie?”

  He put on his parakeet record, very low. His other birds cackled and chattered as they ate their breakfast, and the parakeet jumped from the fire escape onto the windowsill to get a better view. He was going to win, Mr. McKenny knew it. After a moment, he crept very slowly toward the window and sprinkled some birdseeds on the carpet. The parakeet looked at them curiously. And then it jumped down. Still moving slowly, Mr. McKenny circled it and closed the window. He had already closed the other front window, which was a little to the left.

  He prepared an empty cage with seeds and water and set it on the floor with its door open. Sometimes parakeets liked to go back into cages if they had been on their own and a bit frightened for several hours. Then, having checked to see that there was no possible escape for the parakeet in the apartment, he went out and bought the morning papers.

  Mr. McKenny had hardly hoped for a notice this soon, but there it was in the lost and found column of the Times: “parakeet. Felix. Blue with some green. Lost 48th St. East yesterday. Beloved pet. Reward.” And then the phone number.

  “Felix?” Mr. McKenny called to the bird.

  “Fee-ix!” replied the parakeet impatiently, over its shoulder as it were, and continued sidling around the caged parakeets like a cocky sailor.

  “Felix!” said Mr. McKenny, extending a finger.

  “Fee-ix! Har! Har! Har!�
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  “Har! Har! Har! Har! Har!” echoed the parakeets in the cages.

  “Arrrk or-set!” Queenie suggested.

  “Oh, no! No dark closet for Felix! That wouldn’t be nice.” Mr. McKenny had apologized to Queenie so many times for having put her into a dark closet the day the reporter had come, Queenie had learned the two words. He went to the telephone, held the paper up close to his eyes and carefully dialed the number.

  A woman with a foreign accent answered and said it was Miss Somebody’s residence, a name Mr. McKenny did not catch.

  “I think I have found the parakeet,” Mr. McKenny said.

  “Ah! Felix? You think so? Un moment, s’il vous plait!—Mademoiselle!”

  Mr. McKenny held the wire and nearly a minute passed. Then another excited feminine voice said:

  “Hello! You’ve got Felix? Where are you? You really have Felix?”

  “Yes, I think so, but I can’t be sure,” said Mr. McKenny, feeling surer by the minute.

  “Where? Where did you find him? Where can I find you?”

  “I can bring him to you. I have a cage,” Mr. McKenny said out of old habit. “Perhaps you can tell me your address.”

  Mr. McKenny took down the address and printed the name, Dianne Walker. A simple name, yet when that French maid had said it . . . Mr. McKenny said he could bring Felix over in about forty-five minutes. That would give him time for his cup of tea and piece of toast. Felix would also have to be coaxed into a cage.

  In less than fifteen minutes Mr. McKenny had finished his breakfast, but Felix was still at large in the apartment. Mr. McKenny crept up close and, distracting Felix with one hand, set his hat down gently over the bird with the other. He got Felix into the cage with no more damage than a little bleeding V in one forefinger.

  “You’re going to be very much happier where I’m taking you,” Mr. McKenny said soothingly, and with no hard feelings about the bite. “I’m going to take you home.”