Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  But few heads looked up from the soup bowls. Miss Tiller, who surely would have had a rejoinder, as she had for every Brookfleld announcement or regulation, was not present, because she insisted on her meals being served in her room, where she ignored the three women who shared the room with her, unless it was to give them orders, which they in turn ignored.

  “Nothing to worry about!” Superintendent Sweeney continued cheerfully. “Just the opposite! So this should be an especially happy dinner time!”

  “Who’s leaving?” a creaky voice asked.

  “Leaving where?” asked a woman.

  “Where? . . . Who? . . . Where?”

  More than half the assembled diners, however, might not have heard the announcement. The Brookfield Center staff had decided that it was better to give advance notice like this, and to let it sink into the minds of a few, than to have certain well-known faces vanish from the scene, and also to prevent the releasees from feeling that they were suddenly being ousted. The staff had foreseen that some might resist going, whereas some not fit to leave might want to.

  This was more or less the picture, when Superintendent Sweeney, a younger nurse, and a couple of male helpers set about informing individuals, and helping them pack up. Sweeney was convinced that some were suddenly pretending helplessness, confusion or whatever, because Brookfleld had been a comfortable berth for just too long. Her temper came back, and she said to more than one: “You are going, whether you like it or not, because there’re plenty that need this room more than you do!”

  Miss Gloria Tiller professed to be “utterly delighted” at the prospect of leaving this curious and ill-kept palace, and said she expected her barge at the door the following morning.

  Meanwhile, the same thing was happening at prisons. The quiet types, the alert and often jocular types, ageing rapists who had been in the jug for decades, myriads of petty thieves, one-and two-time muggers, tranquil-looking murderers of low IQ who had spent the past years learning shoe repair and plumbing—thousands of these were set free from Maine to California.

  They took buses, they hitchhiked, some had friends or relatives who wired airfares, many simply walked. All were given between fifty and a hundred dollars in cash, depending on the wealth of the State, “to enable them to get to their families or to other destinations.”

  A taciturn and pleasant-looking man of fifty, who had been in prison for the past thirteen years for “repeated rape,” saw his sexual fantasy materialize hardly ten minutes after he quit a penal institution in Illinois. A girl in a bright summer dress was riding a bicycle toward him, pedaling in a leisurely way along the sunlit road at whose edge the released man, one Fred Wechsler, had been trying to hitch a ride to somewhere. Fred did not hesitate. He threw himself in front of the bicycle, which rolled over him, bouncing the girl off, and he satisfied his desire in a ditch conveniently near. His dream had come true! Freedom was heaven, heaven again! Fred climbed out of the ditch and walked on, having remembered to pick up his carryall with his few possessions. Soon he got a ride southward. The girl in the ditch had been knocked out by her fall, but realized what had happened when she came to. She reported this mishap to the police in her small town.

  In Raleigh, North Carolina, expert car thieves who had not met in prison made acquaintance in a café near the penitentiary from which they had just been released, and decided to pool their talents.

  But for many of the mentally ill, freedom struck them like a fog, and they didn’t know where to go.

  Letters began to come in from the public to newspapers and radio stations. Newspaper items lent credence to the public’s anxiety: a man who had suffered bankruptcy, then a breakdown and “loss of mental competence,” made his way back to the headquarters of his former company which had the same name but was in other hands, and insisted that he was still its head, and that the crooks should get out. He put up a fight, when an attempt was made to eject him, grabbed a fire axe, killed a woman and wounded two men before he could be subdued. In another incident, a divorced woman returned to her old home, where her former husband lived with his new wife and family, and refused to leave, the “authorities” had to be called in, and the woman taken away forcibly, leaving the family in a state of shock.

  Miss Tiller, alias Cleopatra, had declined to take the bus laid on by Brookfield Center, preferring to wait for her barge, for which she looked anxiously along the highway. She was joined by a courteous man of short stature, whose gestures indicated that he wished to be of assistance, and Miss Tiller handed him a reticule containing her nightdress, two long gowns, and her make-up kit. She hailed a huge dark shape coming toward them on the highway, hailed it so urgently and with such determination that the shape stopped.

  It was an eighteen-wheel truck, two men sat up in the driver’s cabin, and one got down. Miss Tiller and the helpful little man climbed aboard.

  “Where y’bound?” asked the driver.

  “Alexandria,” replied Miss Tiller.

  “Y’mean—what State d’y’mean? Virginia?”

  “State? Egypt!” said Miss Tiller.

  Bert nodded accord with Miss Tiller.

  “No kiddin’!” said the driver, genuinely surprised.

  “You’ll be wantin’ the airport then. Cleveland, maybe.” The man next to the driver had begun to smile. “We’re headin’ in the wrong direction for the airport.”

  Miss Tiller turned her narrow and rather elegant face to him and said, “I’ll be going by barge, thank you.”

  The driver laughed, and started moving. “Barge!—By canal maybe?”

  They drove through the little town of Temple, where Miss Tiller said she did not want to be put down, but she grew excited at the sight of the next town which was much larger, and she told the driver he could let her down anywhere. It was the presence of so many people that excited her.

  Bert got down with her.

  Miss Tiller rose on her toes and sniffed the air like a hunting dog. “This is more like it!”

  Bert plucked at the front of his Brookfield-issue shirt, as if it disgusted him, and glanced up at Miss Tiller.

  “Clothes!” she said, knowing Bert didn’t hear her, because she had realized by now that he was a deaf-mute.

  The first department store they entered had clothes not to the taste of either, and Bert indicated with grimaces that he thought the prices outrageous, while Miss Tiller informed a shopgirl that she wouldn’t have any of the items as a gift. In another street they came upon a thrift shop whose window held all manner of interesting garments. Bert at once bought a black derby, trousers, a pair of big comfortable shoes, and a jacket, all of which cost hardly twenty dollars, and he acquired a cane for fifty cents. Miss Tiller took somewhat longer for her purchases, but found what she wanted, a long purple dress with gold sequins and a terrible rent down the back, unfortunately, but she was so slender the material could overlap, and with a broad red alligator belt, the rent did not show. She bought high-heeled sandals—such a pleasure after the medium-heeled shoes issued by Brookfield that were neither here nor there—and a large flat purse into which she put her money, make-up and comb.

  “My servant will pay,” she said as she started to walk out of the door. She was stopped.

  Bert paid gallantly for both of them, whereupon Miss Tiller handed over all her money, eighty dollars, into Bert’s care.

  “Royalty does not carry money,” said Miss Tiller.

  They went in search of an eating place, and were attracted by a gold-painted diner from which cheerful music came. Lots of heads turned as they walked in, for Miss Tiller wore a rhinestone tiara now.

  “Hey, who’s she?” a man asked.

  “Look, it’s Charlie Chaplin!” a little boy yelled.

  “Cleopatra, Queen of all Egypt,” Miss Tiller replied, when asked by two workmen in overalls who she was.

  Meanwhile, Bert did a few turns to the music whose beat he could detect by throbs in the floor and his eardrums, dancing around his cane, and smiling
at the people in booths and on stools. Miss Tiller had lent him some black mascara at his request, and he had given himself a moustache and arched eyebrows.

  People stared and clapped. Even the waitresses were fascinated.

  “Can you dance? Give us a dance!” someone said.

  The jukebox was playing a waltz. Bert gracefully extended his hand, and Miss Tiller put down her hamburger.

  Bert had no bill to pay at that diner, and in fact he had collected fourteen dollars or more in bills and coins from the floor, when they departed to applause.

  “You two come back ’n’ see us!” a waitress said.

  Two days after being released from prison, the man who liked girls on bicycles had raped five more, and was now in another State. He had bought a change of clothing with his discharge money, and he spent some on food, but so far nothing on transport or housing as the weather was mild. He got lifts easily along the highways, and he didn’t care at all in which direction he went.

  BIKE-GIRL RAPER HITS NINTH VICTIM!

  a headline said by the time Fred Wechsler got to Oklahoma. The nation knew what he looked like from victims’ descriptions: about fifty, five feet eight or nine, greying brown hair, clean shaven, grey or light-blue eyes, medium build. The trouble was that several million men could match this portrait.

  Different shocks were occurring on the West Coast, where prisons and hospitals for mental cases had emptied themselves of all inmates who had good conduct records. The climate was mild, and parking lots and shopping malls were now graced with sleeping forms, groups playing cards by candlelight or torchlight, some singing and drinking wine. Adolescent boys made a sport of harassing these people and got rid of at least three by throwing them over a cliff in the direction of the Pacific. Dwellers in some regions began staying home after nightfall, not wanting to wreck their cars or injure themselves by running over a sleeper on the street, or to be accosted by beggars, or worse, mugged. Bars and discos, cinemas and even restaurants began to lose money, and were consequently behind the Troll-Bashers, as the adolescent cleanup boys called themselves. These boys forcibly removed many people from the streets, took them in pick-up trucks beyond the city limits, and dumped them.

  The government was blamed, the prisons and loony bins were blamed. There was a war between the government and the media, the government trying to minimize the seriousness of the problem (“Lots of people prefer to sleep outdoors,” said the President), and the media wanting to get all the facts and to show interesting pictures on television. Some typical newspaper and TV items were:

  UNKNOWN TENOR TAKES THE STAGE AT THE MET

  A man rushed on to the stage during a performance of Puccini’s Tosca Friday night, pushed Mario aside, and took the hero’s part rather well in a duet with the leading lady, who was understandably in a quandary as to what to do. Laughter gave way to amazement at the quality of the intruder’s performance. He was identified as George Jennings, 26, former inmate of a hospital in North Carolina.

  and

  Shoppers in New York were surprised to see a plump, elderly man sitting on the sidewalk outside a department store, clad only in a white tablecloth tied about himself like a diaper. He professed, in baby talk, to have been abandoned by his mother . . .

  Then there were stories of people who walked on all fours, and, while some newspaper readers wrote letters accusing journalists of inventing these stories, other readers sent photographs of people walking in this manner in their towns. One woman in Kansas wrote an open letter to the President, which her town newspaper printed:

  For the past six months, I have been plagued by a man who thinks my house is his boyhood home, and that I am a certain relative who has usurped the house from him. I am sick and tired of finding this sleeping hulk against my front door when I open it to get the morning paper. The police have twice removed him, but within days he is back. I beg of you to put this man and people like him back where they belong!

  The raper of girls on bikes had acquired a bike himself, and got to Mississippi, then Louisiana, where the weather was still clement. His health had improved, and he picked up money here and there doing odd jobs such as lawn-mowing and yard-tidying, for which he proposed such a low price per hour that few people said no. He made a good impression. Not a soul suspected that he was the rapist sought from coast to coast. A pretty girl in a family did not excite him at all. Only a girl rolling along on a bike turned him on, and by sheer luck, he had so far encountered such a sight only on roads rather far from houses and other people. He could not have counted his conquests by now, and it did not interest him to count them, but the police and the newspapers did, and his score was twenty-eight. Police were tracking him southward, and were once within twenty miles of him, by now looking for a man on a bike, but Fred Wechsler, who did not read newspapers, bought himself a second-hand car around this time. Long ago, before he had been sent to prison, he had driven a car, and the dealer did not ask to see his driving license.

  “A major national and societal tragedy,” the American Psychiatric Society said in commenting on the practice of discharging the still mentally ill from state institutions. “Hardly a section of the country has escaped the ubiquitous presence of these ill and hallucinating human beings, wandering our city streets, huddling in alleys, sleeping over vents. Such is the result of Washington’s shameful policy of cutting federal spending . . .”

  The President replied that the majority of those released had relatives, that charity begins at home, and that Americans had a tradition of giving voluntary aid to the sick and homeless. “In America, people can make it if they try. That’s what America is all about.” This became known as the “Bowl of Soup” speech. A woman wrote a letter which was printed in Time:

  The law-makers and the federal funds distributors in their luxurious quarters in Washington, DC do not see what we see on our streets and doorsteps. I suggest that we citizens band together and bus these criminals and zombies to the White House and show them what we’re talking about.

  (Mrs) Mary V. Benson

  Tallahassee, Florida

  This letter was to have important repercussions.

  Miss Tiller and Bert had not been without a roof over their heads since their first day of freedom. On their first evening, thinking to treat themselves to a steak dinner, they had entered a roadside restaurant called The Steak Place, where there was a pianist beside the bar. The diners could ask the pianist to play songs of their choice. Miss Tiller found this civilized. Bert whistled a tune to the pianist, who at once began playing “Who Will Come and Buy My Violets?,” a background song for one of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous films. Seeing Bert in his Chaplin gear, the people at the tables gave a patter of applause, and there were cries of “Dance for us! . . . Give us a waltz!”

  Miss Tiller conveyed the request to Bert by opening her arms, and waltzing by herself, while Bert twirled gracefully on one foot, the other foot extended in the air behind him. He leaned pensively on his cane, waltzed some shy steps with Miss Tiller, who was taller than he, created his dance as he went along, while Miss Tiller seemed just out of reach, in two senses, to him.

  “More! . . . More!”

  The pianist began another waltz from the old days, Irving Berlin’s “All Alone,” and Bert and Miss Tiller took the dance floor, where a spot was thrown on them, and their appearance provoked shouts of delight. Miss Tiller waltzed and sang, pretending to hold a telephone in her hands.

  A money bowl sat on the piano but, for Bert and Miss Tiller, patrons approached and poked bills into Bert’s jacket pockets and into Miss Tiller’s purse, which hung by its strap over her arm, and which she graciously opened. Others sailed bills folded like airplanes on to the dance floor, and from time to time Bert zoomed his cane under them, or bent from the waist to pick them up, causing Miss Tiller to bump him once and knock him flat.

  The manager spoke with them, when they returned to their table, or rather he spoke with Miss Tiller. Would they agree to come back for the ne
xt two nights, Friday and Saturday? Could Miss Tiller sing again? Yes, of course she could. Half-hour shows at 9 and 11:30 p.m., one hundred dollars per evening, plus what the customers gave, the hotel expenses included? The manager owned a hotel fifty yards away.

  Miss Tiller replied that she thought the proposition most interesting. Bert, watching, nodded his assent. The manager was a little puzzled when Miss Tiller signed an informal agreement with “Cleopatra,” but he said nothing. He was not surprised when Bert signed “Charlie Chaplin.”

  Miss Tiller’s voice was reedy on the high notes, and some she couldn’t touch at all, such as a few in Strauss’s Zerbinetta aria, for instance, but nobody cared. Now she had her barge. Three armless upholstered chairs made it with a couple of long curtains thrown over them, a waiter rolled her on stage, she smoking a cigarette in a long holder. Miss Tiller plainly enjoyed her performances, enjoyed even the laughter at her bad notes. Something magical, something happy flowed between her and Bert, and between them both and the audience. They had to consult with each other like amateurs between numbers, and before informing the pianist what to play. People wanted to shake their hands after a show. And the money fell like rain.

  The owner of The Steak Place, whose restaurant was packed on Saturday night, could not match the money offered Miss Tiller and Bert by a couple of entrepreneurs from San Francisco. Miss Tiller and Bert were off and away.

  Mrs. Mary V. Benson had struck a common chord with her letter in Time. More letters were printed in Time on the subject, and letters came in to Mrs. Benson in Tallahassee. Yes, let’s show Washington! was the idea. They organized. This took weeks, but voluntary effort, which the President had advocated, was not lacking for this cause: gather up the zombies, the panhandlers, the nuts, the exhibitionists, and send them to the White House lawn. Bus companies got into the spirit and offered free transport. Washington, getting wind of this, decided to adopt a “Welcome to All Comers” attitude, and promised a picnic and an open-air forum where people could exchange views, even with the President himself.