Mermaids on the Golf Course: Stories

by Patricia Highsmith

  Odile watched her friend tiptoe towards the door of the ward, then turn back.

  “Odile, I can’t go home without you. I’ll stay till you can leave this place and we’ll go back together.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s unbelievable!” she whispered in French. “What on earth has happened to your face, my darling?”

  Odile said nothing. She was prepared for the worst and expected it, a broad, gravelly scar, perhaps, going from her temple down to her jaw.

  She was still bandaged lightly and had not seen her wound when she and Marie-Claire made their way home six days later. Odile was rather weak, and Marie-Claire was sure it was from shock. She did not tell Marie-Claire that she had seen her literary idol Dennis Hollingwood that fateful day. That was Odile’s secret and would always remain her secret.

  In due time, two days after her return home, Odile’s loose bandage was changed by the Masaratis’ doctor, Dr. Paul Resquin, who shook his head solemnly and murmured some words about the incapacity of English doctors. Odile, sitting in his office for this, nearly fainted even in that position, and she did not ask for a mirror. She imagined the wound bright pink, and rough, an inch and a half or four centimeters broad, slanting across her cheek to well under her jaw, horrid and repellent, making people wince and look away.

  When she did have the courage to look at her scar on another day at the doctor’s, when he removed the bandage for the last time, she saw that it was not as broad as she had feared, nor as rough (Dr. Resquin had deplored its “unnecessary roughness”), but still it was shocking enough. The doctor gave her smelling salts, and made her lie down on his sofa for ten minutes. Then she got into her DC and drove straight home.

  Marie-Claire was sympathetic and at the same time cheerful about it. “It won’t always be pink, Odile. With a little make-up, you’ll hardly see it!”

  This of course wasn’t true. Even with make-up, the roughness made shadows in most lights, no doubt even in candlelight, Odile thought with grim humor, and when would she ever have a romantic dinner by candlelight again? The days of stolen rendezvous with Stefan seemed now to have taken place in prehistoric time, the girl she had been then not even herself, not even related to the woman she was now. Her love life was finished, over, just as surely as Dennis Hollingwood was finished, any further correspondence with him or hope of meeting him again one day in happier circumstances. Oddly, the loss of Dennis Hollingwood, his profound exasperation with her, was to Odile almost as weighty a thing as the loss of her beauty. The word “beauty” might not ever have applied to her, she realized, but she had had a freshness in her not-bad-looking face which now was gone for ever.

  Odile had managed her return to school, the stares and questions and kind words from colleagues, with a quiet courage. But in those first days of facing the public with the big pink scar that lost itself under her jaw—Odile’s mind churned.

  Sometimes she felt almost glad that she had the scar, felt that it was a mark of honor, an announcement to the world that she had paid for her sins. But what sins? Wanting to meet a writer whom she admired? Then her thoughts would become lost, because for one thing, she would realize that Dennis Hollingwood per se hadn’t been worth it, as a writer. There were other writers, Graham Greene, for instance, whom she definitely admired more, and who hadn’t replied at all to her letters. Pride, she thought, it was all nothing but pride on her part. True enough, but good writers, writers of great talent, were worth it all. In a sense, it was these good writers who had rebuffed her, not Dennis Hollingwood himself or per se. Odile felt that she had turned an important corner in her life, because of the brand she bore on her face, and that her ignominy, her abysmal shame of her appearance, now, had made her someone different, humbler, but maybe even stronger, who knew? Time would tell that.

  At other moments, even when she was taking Trixie for a long walk in the fields, Odile would believe that her conspicuous blemish was due to the hand of fate striking her yet again, as it had with her mother’s early death, with the loss of Stefan, and now excluding her from any future happiness with lover or husband. Then she would feel depressed, like a leper who couldn’t ever be cured, like someone even doomed to die in a short time. Odile then saw herself, as she strode vigorously up a slope or leapt a ditch more gracefully than Trixie, growing old with this same scar, and the scar becoming part of her by the time she was forty, for instance, all her friends accustomed to it, accustomed to her solitary existence, for surely it would be by then, with her father likely to die within the next two or three years.

  Odile continued to write to Wilma Knowles, the writer who lived in Canada. She wrote fan letters to two more writers with her old zest and her old genuine admiration—one an Australian, the other American, both novelists. Such correspondence, even if doomed to be one-sided, was Odile’s real life and joy, she realized. And so be it.

  In spring of the next year, her father was laid to rest, as the priest said, in the little cemetery in Ezèvry-la-Montagne, and after the funeral, Odile invited some twenty villagers including Marie-Claire, of course, to the house for food and wine, what the English called funeral meats. Odile was a cheerful and efficient hostess. She was not yet thinking about her father’s absence, but rather that one day she would likely be lowered into the same ground here. Life was nothing but trying for something, followed by disappointment, and people kept on moving, doing what they had to do, serving—what? And whom? Odile felt wise and calm that day, and shed not a tear for her dear old father.

  The Romantic

  When Isabel Crane’s mother died after an illness that had kept her in and out of hospitals for five years and finally at home, Isabel had thought that her life would change dramatically. Isabel was twenty-three, and since eighteen, when many young people embarked on four happy years at college, Isabel had stayed at home, with a job, of course, to help with finances. Boyfriends and parties had been minimal, and she had been in love only once, she thought, or maybe one and a half times, if she counted what she now considered a minor hang-up at twenty on a married man, who had been quite willing to start an affair, but Isabel had held back, thinking it would lead nowhere. The first young man hadn’t liked her enough, but he had lingered longer, in Isabel’s affections, more than a year.

  Yet six weeks after her mother’s funeral, Isabel found that her life had not changed much after all. She had imagined parties, liveliness in the apartment, young people. Well, that could come, of course. She had lost contact with a lot of her old high school friends, because they had got married, moved, and now she didn’t know where to reach most of them. But the world was full of people.

  Even the apartment on West 55th Street had not changed much, though she remembered, while her mother had still been alive, imagining changing the boring Dubonnet-and-cream colored curtains, now limp with age, and getting rid of the nutty little “settles,” as her mother had called them, which took up space and looked like 1940 or worse. These were armless wooden seats without backs, which no one ever sat on, because they looked fragile, rather like little tables. Then there were the old books, not even classics, which filled more than half of the two bookcases (otherwise filled with better books or at least newer books), which Isabel imagined chucking, thereby leaving space for the occasional objet d’art or statuette or something, such as she had seen in magazine photographs of attractive living room interiors. But after weeks and weeks, little of this had been done, certainly not the curtains, and Isabel found that she couldn’t shed even one settle, because nobody she knew wanted one. She had given away her mother’s clothes and handbags to the Salvation Army.

  Isabel was a secretary-typist at Weiler and Diggs, an agency that handled office space in the Manhattan and Queens areas. She had learned typing and steno in her last year at high school. There were four other secretaries, but only Isabel and two others, Priscilla (Prissy) and Valerie, took turns as receptionist at the lobby desk for a week, because they were
younger and prettier than the other two secretaries. It was Prissy, who was very outspoken, who had said this one day, and Isabel thought it was true.

  Prissy Kupperman was going to be married in a few months, and she had met her fiancé one day when she had been at the front desk, and he had walked in. “Reception” was a great place to meet people, men on the way up, all the girls said. Eighty percent of Weiler and Diggs’s clientele was male. A girl could put herself out a little, escort the man to the office he wanted, and when he left, ask him if his visit had been successful and say, “My name is Prissy (or whatever) and if you need to get a message through or any special service, I’ll see that it’s done.” Prissy had done something along these lines the day her Jeff had walked in.

  Valerie, only twenty and a more lightweight type than Prissy, had had several dates with men she had met at work, but she wasn’t ready for marriage, she said, and besides had a steady boyfriend whom she preferred. Isabel had tried the same tactics, escorting young men to the office they wanted, but this so far had never led to a date. Isabel would dearly have loved “a second encounter,” as she termed it to herself, with some of those young men, who might have phoned back and asked to speak with Isabel. She imagined being invited out to dinner, possibly at a place where they had dancing. Isabel loved to dance.

  “You ought to look a little more peppy,” Valerie said one day in the women’s room of the office. “You look too serious sometimes, Isabel. Scares men off, you know?”

  Prissy had been present, doing her lips in the mirror, and they had all laughed a little, even Isabel. Isabel took that remark, as she had taken others, seriously. She would try to look more lighthearted, like Valerie. Once the girls had remarked on a blouse Isabel had been wearing. This had been just after her mother’s death. The blouse had been lavender and white with ruffles around the neck and down the front like a jabot. The girls had pronounced it “too old” for her, and maybe it had been, though Isabel had thought it perky. Anyway, Isabel had never worn it again. The girls meant well, Isabel knew, because they realized that she had spent the preceding five years in a sad way, nursing her mother practically single-handed. Isabel’s father had died of a heart attack when Isabel had been nineteen, and fortunately he had left some life insurance, but that hadn’t been enough for Isabel and her mother to engage a private nurse to come in now and then, even part-time.

  Isabel missed her father. He had been a tailor and presser at a dry cleaning shop, and when Isabel’s mother’s illness had begun, her father had started working overtime, knowing that her cancer was going to be a long and expensive business. Isabel was sure that this was what had led to his heart attack. Her father, a short man with brown and gray hair and a modest manner that Isabel loved, had used to come home stooped with fatigue around ten at night, but always able to swing his arms forward and give Isabel a smile and ask, “How’s my favorite girl tonight?” Sometimes he put his hands lightly on her shoulders and kissed her cheek, sometimes not, as if he were even too tired for that, or as if he thought she might not like it.

  As for social life, Isabel realized that she hadn’t progressed much since she had been seventeen and eighteen, dating now and then with boys she had met through her high school acquaintances, and her high school had been an all-girls school. Isabel considered herself not a knockout, perhaps, but not bad-looking either. She was five feet six with light brown hair that was inclined to wave, which made a short hairdo easy and soft-looking. She had a clear skin, light brown eyes (though she wished her eyes were larger), good teeth, and a medium-sized nose which only slightly turned up. She had of course, checked herself as long as she could remember for the usual faults, body odor or bad breath, or hair on the legs. Very important, those little matters.

  Shortly after Prissy’s remark about her looking too serious, Isabel went to a party in Brooklyn given by one of her old high school friends who was getting married, and Isabel tried deliberately to be merry and talkative. There had been a most attractive young man called Charles Gramm or maybe Graham, tall and fair-haired, with a friendly smile and a rather shy manner. Isabel chatted with him for several minutes, and would have been thrilled if he had asked when he might see her again, but he hadn’t. Later, Isabel reproached herself for not having invited Charles to a drinks party or a Sunday brunch at her apartment.

  This she did a week or so later, inviting Harriet, her Brooklyn hostess, and her fiancé, and asking Harriet to invite Charles, since Harriet must know how to reach him. Harriet did, Charles promised to come, Harriet said, and then didn’t or couldn’t. Isabel’s brunch went quite well with the office girls (all except one who couldn’t make it), but Isabel had no male partner in her efforts, and the brunch did not net her a boyfriend either.

  Isabel read a great deal. She liked romance novels with happy endings. She had loved romances since she had been fourteen or so, and since her mother’s death, when she had more time, she read three or four a week, most of them borrowed from the Public Library, a few bought in paperback. She preferred reading romance novels to watching TV dramas in the evening. Whole novels with descriptions of landscapes and details of houses put her into another world. The romances were rather like a drug, she realized as she felt herself drawn in the evenings towards the living room sofa where lay her latest treasures, yet as drugs went, books were harmless, Isabel thought. They certainly weren’t pot or cocaine, which Prissy said she indulged in at parties sometimes. Isabel loved the first meetings of girl and man in these novels, the magnetic attraction of each for each, the hurdles that had to be got over before they were united. The terrible handicaps made her tense in body and mind, yet in the end, all came out well.

  One day in April, a tall and handsome young man with dark hair strode into the lobby of Weiler and Diggs, though Isabel was not at the reception desk that day. Valerie was. Isabel was just then carrying a stack of photostatted papers weighing nearly ten pounds across the lobby to Mr. Diggs’s office, and she saw Valerie’s mascaraed lashes flutter, her smile widen as she looked up at the young man and said, “Good morning, sir. Can I help you?”

  As it happened, the young man came into Mr. Diggs’s office a minute later, while Isabel was putting the photostats away. Then Mr Diggs said:

  “. . . in another office. Isabel? Can you get Area-six-six-A file for me? Isn’t that in Current?”

  “Yes, sir, and it’s right here. One of these.” Isabel pulled out the folder that Mr. Diggs wanted from near the bottom of the stack she had just brought in.

  “Good girl, thanks,” said Mr. Diggs.

  Isabel started for the door, and the eyes of the young man met hers for an instant, and Isabel felt a pang go through her. Did that mean something important? Isabel carefully opened the door, and closed it behind her.

  In less than five minutes, Mr. Diggs summoned her back. He wanted more photostats of two pages from the file. Isabel made the copies and brought them back. This time the young man did not glance at her, but Isabel was conscious of his broad shoulders under his neat dark blue jacket.

  Isabel ate her coffee-shop lunch that day in a daze. Valerie and Linda (one of the not-so-pretty secretaries) were with her.

  “Who was that Tarzan that came in this morning?” Linda asked with a mischievous smile, as if she really didn’t care. She had addressed Valerie.

  “Oh, wasn’t he ever! He ought to be in movies instead of—whatever he’s doing.” Valerie giggled. “His name’s Dudley Hall. Dudley. Imagine.”

  Dudley Hall. Suddenly the tall, dark man had an identity for Isabel. His name sounded like one of the characters in the novels she read. Isabel didn’t say a word.

  Around four that afternoon, Dudley Hall was back. Isabel didn’t see him come in, but when she was summoned to Mr. Diggs’s office, there he was. Mr. Diggs put her on to more details about the office space on Lexington Avenue that Mr. Hall was interested in. This job took nearly an hour. Mr. Hall came
with her into another office (used by the secretaries, empty now), and Isabel had to make four telephone calls on Mr. Hall’s behalf, which she did with courtesy and patience, writing down neatly the information she gleaned about conditions of floors and walls, and the time space could be seen, and who had the keys now.

  As Mr. Hall pocketed her notes, he said, “That’s very kind of you, Miss—”

  “Isabel,” she said with a smile. “Not kind. Just my job. Isabel Crane, my name is. If you need any extra information—quick service, just ask for Isabel.”

  He smiled back. “I’ll do that. Could I phone my partner now?”

  “Indeed, yes! Go ahead,” said Isabel, indicating a telephone on the desk. “You can dial direct on this one.”

  Isabel lingered, straightening papers on the desk, awaiting a possible question or a request from Mr. Hall to note down something. But he was only making a date with his partner whom he called Al to meet him in half an hour at the Lexington address. Then Mr. Hall left.

  Had he noticed her at all? Isabel wondered. Or was she just another face among the dozen or so girl secretaries he had seen lately? Isabel could almost believe she was in love with him, but to be in love was dangerous as well as being pleasant: she might never see Dudley Hall again.

  By the middle of the next week, the picture had changed. There were a few legal matters that caused Mr. Hall to come to Weiler and Diggs several times. Isabel was called in each time, because by now she was familiar with the file. She typed letters, and provided Dudley Hall and Albert Frenay with clear, concise memos.