This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

  When David answered a knock on his door at five-thirty, he saw that expression of dull surprise and curiosity on the face of Mrs. McCartney as she gazed past him into his room. Her lean, gray uprightness and efficiency irritated and repelled David. Behind her quick smile, as false as her teeth, David knew she was reassuring herself once more that his room, her property, every thread and splinter of it, was still intact in all its ugliness. It pained David most to think that two sons who lived in St. Louis had Mrs. McCartney for a mother.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, David,” Mrs. McCartney said, “but Mrs. Beecham said she’d like you to go up and see her before you leave.” She leaned forward and whispered, “I think she’s got a little something for your mother, the sweet old thing.”

  “All right. Thank you very much, Mrs. McCartney.”

  “And thank you for the rent,” she said, making a backward retreat. She checked herself. “You didn’t notice that biggest window leaking any, did you? That rain Monday—”

  David glanced quickly at the window behind him, a huge window flanked by two small tall windows and set in an oriel bay. “Not a bit,” he said, “not a bit.” It probably had leaked, but he did not want Mrs. McCartney or her handyman George prowling about his room while he was gone.

  “Good. Well, have a nice weekend, David, and give our regards to your mother.”

  “I will, thanks.” David waited behind his closed door until her steps faded to silence on the stairs, then went out and locked his door behind him.

  Mrs. Beecham lived on the third floor at the back. The third floor of the house was much smaller than the others, and had only Mrs. Beecham’s room, a bath at the center rear, and a room the size of Mrs. Beecham’s at the left which Mrs. McCartney slept in. David knocked gently on Mrs. Beecham’s door, and her sweet, high voice immediately called, “Come in, David.” She knew his step.

  She was in her wheelchair with some knitting and a book on her lap. On the book stood her rectangular magnifying lens which she moved downward on the page as she knitted and read simultaneously. She was eighty-seven, and she had been paralyzed in her left leg and partially paralyzed in her left arm for twenty years from a stroke. Her daughter in California sent her a little money regularly, but David had heard that she never came to visit her.

  “Sit down, David,” Mrs. Beecham said, gesturing to a broken straw-bottomed straight chair. “I was hoping I’d catch you before you took off. Didn’t you say your mother was about my size?” She had thrust her chair expertly over to her bureau and parked it sidewise.

  “Just about,” David said, as he had many times before. “Don’t tell me you’ve made something else.” He had sat down, smiling, to be polite, but he leaped up nervously as she drew a pink garment out of her bureau drawer.

  “It’s just another bedjacket. You know it doesn’t take me any time to make ’em, David, and who else’ve I got to give ’em to?”

  David examined it appreciatively, and tried to think what he could give Mrs. Beecham in return. He had given her several presents. But presents for Mrs. Beecham were difficult for him to think of. “It’s really beautiful, Mrs. Beecham. You know, though, she’s still wearing that other one you made her—last year.”

  “Won’t hurt to have two. Two pairs of socks aren’t hardly enough for you neither, David. Be sure you bring ’em to me when they get holey. I’m making my new little great-grandchild a coat and bonnet now, but socks for you come next.” She was fiddling with her knitting needles, too old and gray to blush with her pleasure at David’s liking the bedjacket.

  David stood looking at the pink thing in his hands, abandoning the idea of asking her anything about her great-grandchild, whose sex he had forgotten, because he was not sure her family had been decent enough to send her a picture of it.

  “I asked that nice girl downstairs to bring me home a box for it, and I know she will, but she’s not back yet. I know her walk already, I do.” Mrs. Beecham looked at him brightly through glasses that enlarged and made quite visible to David the cataracts in both pupils.

  “What girl?” David asked.

  “Effie Brennan. You don’t mean to say you haven’t met her?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, I have,” David said with a smile. “Well, Mrs. Beecham, what can I bring back for you this trip? Some more of that cheese you like? A plant you’d like?” Her east windows were banked with potted, blossoming plants of all kinds.

  “There’s not hardly any more room, is there, David?” she said with a laugh. Then she held up a finger warningly. “There’s Effie now.”

  “I’d better go.” David unzipped his duffel bag, shielding it slightly with his body, though Mrs. Beecham probably could not have seen what was in it at this distance, and put the folded bedjacket carefully into it. “I know she’ll be crazy about that,” he said, standing up. “Well, until Monday morning. You take care of yourself, Mrs. Beecham.”

  The old lady seemed in a trance of expectation at the sound of the girl’s approaching footsteps, and did not reply to David who awkwardly awaited one word from her as dismissal. Then the knock came, and Mrs. Beecham sang out for her to come in.

  She fairly burst into the room, her arm full of gold-colored flowers, and David might have retreated out the door without being seen, if he had been ruder or quicker.

  “Now here’s your box,” Mrs. Beecham said excitedly, taking the silver-and-white striped box from the girl’s arm. “Put it in, it looks nicer.”

  “Hi, there,” said Effie, smiling broadly. “So the box was for you.”

  “My mother,” said David. “Thanks very much for troubling about it.” He unzipped the bag and whisked the bedjacket out.

  Effie helped him, unnecessarily, to wrap the bedjacket in the piece of tissue that was in the box. Their hands brushed and David drew his back quickly. The girl looked at him.

  He tucked the box under his arm. “I’ll be going, Mrs. Beecham. Thanks again.” He nodded to the girl. “Good-bye.” Then he closed the door on Mrs. Beecham’s “Drive carefully, David,” and on the girl’s alert and staring eyes. He heard their rather whining, female voices as he went down the stairs. He supposed Mrs. Beecham would be telling her what a fine young man he was. He knew that several of the roomers, behind his back, called him “The Saint.” It was annoying, and David tried to forget it.

  David took a highway northward. Dusk was falling with a swiftness that meant the beginning of winter, and David was glad. He loved the night better than the day, despite his occasional melancholic moments at night, and he loved winter better than summer. Now in the car, heading for home, he allowed himself to daydream about the evenings to come, sitting by his fireside with books, or working on furniture down in the cellar, or lying on the floor in front of the fireplace listening to music in the dark. To hell with the flowers of summer, cut roses that perished in less than a week. When he looked out his living room windows, he could see green ivy, strong and dark, clinging to the rough stone of the house’s foundation. He had seen ivy embalmed in ice, still green and alive. It asked for no care, though he gave it some care, and it endured through summer and winter.

  At a crossroads of a town called Ballard, about a mile from his house, David stopped at a butcher’s shop and bought a steak and some hamburger meat. At another store he bought fresh rolls, salad greens, a couple of pears, and some imported mustard of a kind he had never tried. And at a liquor shop next door, he bought two bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé and a case of Frascati. Then he drove on, turned onto a narrow tar road and then onto a dirt road. Woods of pine trees grew on either side. The car rattled the boards of a little bridge over a stream, and then at the next slight curve, his headlights made the white jambs of his windows flash briefly, like a welcoming hail.

  There were no other houses around. David’s house was of stone and brick, and had a disproportionately tall chimney at one end, as if the c
himney had been built for a house one story higher than this. The color was a dull brown with here and there a shade of gray—the color of natural stone. Someone had once seeded the lawn, so there was some growth of grass now, but this went quickly into woods on three sides. Even on the fourth side, where his headlights had picked out the window jambs, a couple of pine trees grew, taller than the chimney.

  David, with one bag of his groceries in his arm, unlocked his front door and automatically wiped his shoes on a rough brown doormat before he went in. He clicked on the light to the right of the door, and with a deep intake of breath surveyed the attractive living room, its smooth couch, its brown and white cowhide rugs, the mantel with its two photographs of Annabelle, his shelves of books and records, before he went into the kitchen with the groceries. Within half an hour he had taken a shower, changed to clean blue jeans and shirt in the bedroom upstairs, turned up the furnace, stored his case of wine in the cellar, put his groceries away, and laid a fire. He lit the fire, and for the second time that evening took down a photograph of a faintly smiling girl with brown, waving hair that hung to her shoulders, and gently kissed its lips. Then he made a small pitcher of martinis, poured two in generous, stemmed glasses beside a plate of anchovies and black olives, sipped a little from one glass, then went to work installing a wall lamp he had brought in his duffel bag. It was a special kind of lamp that he had ordered from a New York department store by mail and had sent to Mrs. McCartney’s. He fixed it to the wall above the couch, between some bookshelves. By that time, he had drunk the first martini, and he carried the second into the kitchen with him to sip while he prepared dinner. He remembered that he had used to lift his first martini to an imaginary Annabelle and say, “To you,” before he drank, and say it again when he lifted the second, but he was glad to realize he had not done that in several months. No use being that absurd. A man could start losing his mind if he kept that kind of thing up.

  While his potato was baking, he put a Brahms symphony on his stereo, and set the gleaming mahogany table with silver, wine glass, and linen napkin for one. Then he laid a book on geology within reach in case he should want to read while he ate. He hummed softly to the beautiful first movement of the symphony, not loud enough to have annoyed anyone, if anyone else had been present, for having no neighbors, he played the machine loudly, and now it drowned out his humming. He moved very smoothly and happily, more smoothly and far more happily than he did at Mrs. McCartney’s or at the factory. Now and then he paused, lifted the second martini, which was still not empty, and looked into the living room with expectantly raised brows as if Annabelle, sitting there, had said something to him or asked a question. Sometimes, too, he imagined her in the kitchen with him.

  And sometimes, after the two martinis and a half bottle of wine at dinner, he imagined that he heard Annabelle call him Bill, and that made him smile, because when that happened, he’d gotten tangled up himself. In this house, his house, he liked to imagine himself William Neumeister—a man who had everything he wanted, a man who knew how to live, to laugh, and to be happy. David had bought the house in the name of William Neumeister, and the few local tradespeople, the garbage collector, and his real estate agent knew him as William Neumeister. David had picked the name out of the blue one day, had at once realized that it meant “new master” in German and that it was therefore rather silly and obvious why it had occurred to him, but the name sounded good to him, a comfortable mouthful, and so he kept it.

  At first, nearly two years ago, when he heard that Annabelle had married Gerald Delaney, David had merely wanted to escape, at any cost, the pressure and the pain of his depression. He was not the sort to throw up his job, stay drunk for weeks, or any of that. On the contrary, he had tried to work harder to shut it all out until he could recover enough to think what had to be done. He had wanted privacy and a change of scene, and because of his job the change of scene had been impossible. But he dreamed about a change of scene, and as he dreamed he enriched his fantasy. Why not, for a time, imagine it had not happened, Annabelle’s horrible mistake of a marriage? Why not, just for a while, the blessed relief of imagining that Annabelle had married him? And what would he and she be doing? He would certainly have moved out of his small apartment in Froudsburg and into a pretty house somewhere. Without hesitation he had made the split as it remained to this day: the ugly boardinghouse in Froudsburg where he worked, and the house in the country into which he put ninety per cent of his earnings and as much time as he could. He had not wanted to make the house traceable to David Kelsey, so he had invented the other name, and with the new name came to some extent a new character—William Neumeister who had never failed at anything, at least nothing important, who therefore had won Annabelle. She lived with him here, he imagined as he browsed through his books, as he shaved on Saturday and Sunday mornings, as he puttered about his grounds.

  He had not acquired the house overnight. It had taken him weeks to prepare William Neumeister’s references: one from a “Richard Patterson,” who subscribed to a mail and telephone service in New York City, and who replied to the querying letter of Mr. Willis, the real estate agent, recommending William Neumeister in the highest terms; another word of commendation from “John Atherley,” in whose name David had maintained a room for a week or so in a Poughkeepsie hotel, where he had picked up Mr. Willis’s letter. A last small precaution was joining the library in Beck’s Brook, a town a little north of Ballard, an action for which no references had been asked. In addition, he had borrowed a few thousand dollars (since paid back) from his Uncle Bert, so that his down payment on the house could be substantial. Real estate agents were not apt to be suspicious of people who could pay in cash a third of the value of a house. He had told his uncle he wanted the money because he was thinking of buying a house, and a few months later said he had changed his mind and would continue living in the boardinghouse. At the First National Bank of Beck’s Brook he had opened small checking and savings accounts simultaneously, again using Patterson and Atherley as references for William Neumeister, but evidently these were never investigated, as David received no letters from the bank.

  His house had the tremendous virtue of never being lonely. He felt Annabelle’s presence in every room. He behaved as if he were with her, even when he meditatively ate his meals. It was not like the boardinghouse, where with all that humanity around him he felt as lonely as an atom in space. In the pretty house Annabelle was with him, holding his hand as they listened to Bach and Brahms and Bartók, making fun of him if he were absentminded. He walked and breathed in a kind of glory within the house. Sunlight was like heaven, and rainy weekends had their peculiar charm.

  At night, he slept with her in the double bed upstairs. Her head lay on his arm, and when he turned to her and held her close, the surge of his desire had more than once reached the summit and gone over with the imagined pressure of her body, though afterward, his hand, flat against the sheet, reported only emptiness and aloneness. On one Sunday morning, he threw away the bottle of Kashmir that he had bought because Annabelle had often worn it. He did not need such things to recall her. The perfume was even too much.

  On Sunday evening, after a dinner of charcoal-broiled steak that he had cooked in the fireplace, David sat down at the beige, Japanese-style desk in the extra room upstairs, opened his fountain pen, and spent perhaps ten minutes in thought. When he had composed his letter in his mind, he took from a cubbyhole that contained nothing else the two letters he had received from Annabelle. Their envelopes were postmarked Hartford, Connecticut, a town David knew slightly and considered nearly as ugly as Froudsburg. He knew the rows of red brick houses with ten feet of space between them and that space cluttered with garbage cans and children’s play wagons. He knew the flapping clotheslines and the tangles of television aerials on the roofs. He knew even Annabelle’s street, though when he had gone there, he had not wanted to identify her house in the red row. It would have been like pressing his f
ingers against a painful wound, instead of merely looking at it.