Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

by Patricia Highsmith

  That was how, one month later, she got her abortion. The most blessed event that ever happened to her.

  She had to stay in the place—Bellevue—all that time. When she told the shrinks she was really fed up with marriage, her marriage, they seemed to believe her and to understand, yet they admitted to her finally that all their treatment was designed to make her go back to that marriage. Meanwhile, the three kids—Helen had recovered—were in some kind of free nursery. Eddie had come to see her, but she didn’t want to see him, and thank God they hadn’t forced her to. Laura wanted a divorce, but she knew Eddie would never say yes to a divorce. He thought people just didn’t get divorced. Laura wanted to be free, independent, and alone. She didn’t want to see the kids, either.

  “I want to make a new life,” she said to the psychiatrists, who had become as boring as Mrs. Crabbe.

  The only way to get out of the place was to fool them, Laura realized, so she began to humor them, gradually. She would be allowed to go, they said, on condition that she went back to Eddie. But she wrung from a doctor a signed statement—she insisted on having it in writing—that she was to have no more children, which effectively meant that she had a right to take the Pill.

  Eddie didn’t like that, even if it was a doctor’s orders. “That’s not marriage,” Eddie said.

  Eddie had found a girlfriend while she was in Bellevue, and some nights he didn’t come home, and went to work from wherever he was sleeping. Laura hired a detective for just one day, and discovered the woman’s name and address. Then Laura sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery, no alimony asked, real Women’s Lib. Eddie got the kids, which was fine with Laura because he wanted them more than she did. Laura got a full-time job in a department store, which was a bit tough, standing on her feet for so many hours, but all in all not so tough as what she had left. She was only twenty-five, and quite nice looking if she took the time to do her face and dress properly. There were good chances of advancement in her job, too.

  “I feel peaceful now,” Laura said to a new friend to whom she had told her past. “I feel different, as if I’ve lived a hundred years, and yet I’m still pretty young . . . Marriage? No, never again.”

  SHE WOKE UP and found it was all a dream. Well, not all a dream. The awakening was gradual, not a sudden awareness as in the morning when you open your eyes and see what’s really in front of you. She’d been taking two kinds of pills on the doctor’s orders. Now it seemed to her that the pills had been trick pills, to make the world seem rosy, to make her more cheerful—but really to get her to walk back into the same trap, like a doped sheep. She found herself standing at the sink on Hudson Street with a dishtowel in her hands. It was morning. 10:22 by the clock by the bed. But she had been to Bellevue, hadn’t she? And Georgie had died, because now in the apartment there were only Stevie and Helen and Francy. It was September, she saw by a newspaper that was lying on the kitchen table. And—where was it? The piece of paper the doctor had signed?

  Where did she keep it, in her billfold? She looked and it wasn’t there. She unzipped the pocket in her handbag. Not there either. But she’d had it. Hadn’t she? For an instant, she wondered if she was pregnant, but there wasn’t a sign of it at her waistline. Then she went as if drawn by a mysterious force, a hypnotist’s force, to a bruised brown leather box where she kept necklaces and bracelets. In this box was a tarnished old silver cigarette case big enough for only four cigarettes, and inside this was a folded piece of crisp white paper. That was it. She had it.

  She went into the bathroom and looked into the medicine cabinet. What did they look like? There was something called Ovral. That must be it, it sounded sort of eggy. Well, at least she was taking them, the bottle was half empty. And Eddie was annoyed. She remembered now. But he had to put up with it, that was all.

  But she hadn’t tracked down his girlfriend with a detective. She hadn’t had the job in the department store. Funny, when it was all so clear, that job, selling bright scarves and hosiery, making up her face so she looked great, making new friends. Had Eddie had a girlfriend? Laura simply wasn’t sure. Anyway, he had to put up with the Pill now, which was one small triumph for her. But it didn’t quite make up for what she had to put up with. Francy was crying. Maybe it was time to feed her.

  Laura stood in the kitchen, biting her underlip, thinking she had to feed Francy now—food always shut her up a little—and thinking she’d have to start thinking hard, now that she could think, now that she was fully awake. Good God, life couldn’t just go on like this, could it? She’d doubtless lost the job at the diner, so she’d have to find another, because they couldn’t make it on Eddie’s pay alone. Feed Francy.

  The doorbell rang. Laura hesitated briefly, then pushed the release button. She had no idea who it was.

  Francy yelled.

  “All right!” Laura snapped, and headed for the fridge.

  A knock on the door.

  Laura opened the door. It was Mrs. Crabbe.

  Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie

  The façade of Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors glittered and throbbed with red and yellow lights, even in the daytime. Golden balls like knobs—the yellow lights—pulsated amid the red lights, attracting the eye, holding it.

  Clive Wilkes loved the place, the inside and outside equally. Since he was a delivery boy for a grocery store, it was easy for him to say a certain delivery had taken him longer than might be expected—he’d had to wait for Mrs. So-and-so to get home, because the doorman had told him she was due any minute, or he’d had to go five blocks to find some change, because Mrs. Zilch had had only a fifty-dollar bill. At these spare moments, and Clive found one or two a week, he visited Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors.

  Inside the establishment, you went through a dark passage to get in the mood, and then you were confronted by a bloody murder scene: a girl with long blonde hair was sticking a knife into the neck of an old man who sat at a kitchen table eating his dinner. His dinner was a couple of wax frankfurters and wax sauerkraut. Then came the Lindbergh kidnapping, with Hauptmann climbing down a ladder outside a nursery window. You could see the top of the ladder outside the window, and the top half of Hauptmann’s figure, clutching the little boy. Also there was Marat in his bath with Charlotte nearby. And Christie with his stocking throttlings of women. Clive loved every tableau, and they never became stale. But he didn’t look at them with the solemn, vaguely startled expression of the other people who looked at them. Clive was inclined to smile, even to laugh. They were amusing. Why not laugh? Farther on in the museum were the torture chambers—one old, one modern, purporting to show twentieth-century torture methods in Nazi Germany and in French Algeria. Madame Thibault—who Clive strongly suspected did not exist—kept up to date. There were the Kennedy assassinations, of course, the Tate massacre, and as like as not a murder that had happened just a month ago somewhere.

  Clive’s first definite ambition in regard to Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors was to spend a night there. This he did one night, providently taking along a cheese sandwich in his pocket. It was fairly easy to accomplish. Clive knew that three people worked in the museum proper, down in the bowels as he thought of it, though the museum was on street level, while another man, a plumpish middle-aged fellow in a nautical cap, sold tickets out in front at a booth. There were two men and a woman who worked in the bowels. The woman, also plump with curly brown hair and glasses and about forty, took the tickets at the end of the dark corridor, where the museum began. One of the men lectured constantly, though not more than half the people ever bothered to listen. “Here we see the fanatical expression of the true murderer, captured by the wax artistry of Madame Thibault . . . blah-blah-blah . . .” The other man had black hair and black-rimmed glasses, and he just drifted around, shooing away kids who wanted to climb into the tableaux, maybe watching for pickpockets, or maybe protecting women from unpleasant assaults in the semi-dar
kness of the place, Clive didn’t know.

  He only knew it was quite easy to slip into one of the dark corners or into a nook next to one of the Iron Molls—maybe even into one of the Iron Molls, but slender as he was, the spikes might poke him, Clive thought, so he ruled out this idea. He had observed that people were gently urged out around 9:15 P.M. as the museum closed at 9:30 P.M. And lingering as late as possible one evening, Clive had learned that there was a sort of cloak room for the staff behind a door in one back corner, from which he had also heard the sound of a toilet flushing.

  So one night in November, Clive concealed himself in the shadows, which were abundant, and listened to the three people as they got ready to leave. The woman—whose name seemed to be Mildred—was lingering to take the money box from Fred, the ticket-seller, and to count it and deposit it somewhere in the cloak room. Clive was not interested in the money, at least not very interested. He was interested in spending a night in the place, to be able to say that he had.

  “Night, Mildred! See you tomorrow!” called one of the men.

  “Anything else to do? I’m leaving now,” said Mildred. “Boy, am I tired! But I’m still going to watch Dragon Man tonight.”

  “Dragon Man,” the other man repeated, uninterested.

  Evidently the ticket-seller Fred left from the front of the building after handing in the money box, and in fact Clive recalled seeing him close up the front once, cutting the lights from inside the entrance door, locking it.

  Clive stood in a nook by an Iron Moll. When he heard the back door shut, and the key turn in the lock, he waited for a moment in delicious silence, aloneness, and suspense, then ventured out. He went first on tiptoe to the room where they kept their coats, because he had never seen it. He had brought matches (also cigarettes, though smoking was not allowed, according to several signs), and with the aid of a match, he found the light switch. The room contained an old desk, four or five metal lockers, a tin wastebasket, an umbrella stand, and some books in a bookcase against a rather grimy wall that had once been white. Clive slid open a drawer or two, and found the well-worn wooden box which he had once seen the ticket-seller carrying in through the front door. The box was locked. He could walk out with the box, he thought, but in fact he didn’t care to, and he considered this rather decent of himself. He gave the box a wipe with the side of his hand, not forgetting the bottom where his fingertips had touched. That was funny, he thought, wiping something he hadn’t stolen.

  Clive set about enjoying the night. He found the lights, and put them on, so that the booths with the gory tableaux were all illuminated. He was hungry, and took one bite of his sandwich and put it back in the paper napkin in his pocket. He sauntered slowly past the John F. Kennedy assassination—Robert, Jackie, doctors bending anxiously over the white table on which JFK lay, leaking an ocean of blood which covered the floor. This time Hauptmann’s descent of the ladder made Clive giggle. Charles Lindbergh Jr.’s face looked so untroubled, one might have thought he was sitting on the floor of his nursery playing with blocks. Clive swung a leg over a metal bar and climbed into the Judd-Snyder fracas. It gave him a thrill to be standing right with them, inches from the throttling-from-behind which the lover was administering to the husband. Clive put a hand out and touched the red-paint blood that was beginning to come from the man’s throat where the wire pressed. Clive also touched the cool cheekbones of the victim. The popping eyes were of glass, vaguely disgusting, and Clive did not touch those.

  Two hours later, he was singing a church hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee” and “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Clive didn’t know all the words. He smoked.

  By 2 A.M. he was bored, and tried to get out by both front door and back, but couldn’t. No spare keys anywhere that he could find. He’d thought of having a hamburger at an all-night place between here and home. His incarceration didn’t bother him, however, so he finished the now dry cheese sandwich, made use of the toilet, and slept for a bit on three straight chairs which he arranged in a row. It was so uncomfortable, he knew he would wake up in a while, which he did at 5 A.M. He washed his face, and went for another look at the wax exhibits. This time he took a souvenir—Woodrow Wilson’s necktie.

  As the hour of nine approached—Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors opened at 9:30 A.M.—Clive hid himself in an excellent spot, behind one of the tableaux whose backdrop was a black and gold Chinese screen. In front of the screen was a bed and in the bed lay a wax man with a handlebar mustache, who was supposed to be dead from poisoning by his wife.

  The public began trickling in shortly after 9:30 A.M., and the taller, solemn man began mumbling his boring lecture. Clive had to wait till a few minutes past ten before he felt safe enough to mingle with the crowd and make his exit, with Woodrow Wilson’s necktie rolled up in his pocket. He was a bit tired, but happy. Though on second thought, who would he tell about it? Joey Vrasky, that blond idiot who worked behind the counter at Simmons’s Grocery? Hah! Why bother? Joey didn’t deserve a good story. Clive was half an hour late for work.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Simmons, I overslept,” Clive said hastily, but he thought quite politely, as he came into the store. There was a delivery job awaiting him. Clive took his bicycle and put the box in front of the handlebars on a platform which had a curb, so a box would not fall off.

  Clive lived with his mother, a thin, highly strung woman who was a saleswoman in a shop that sold stockings, girdles and underwear. Her husband had left her when Clive was five. She had no other children but Clive. Clive had quit high school a year before graduating, to his mother’s regret, and for a year he had done nothing but lie around the house or stand on street corners with his chums. But Clive had never been very chummy with any of his friends, for which his mother was thankful, as she considered them a worthless lot. Clive had had the delivery job at Simmons’s for nearly a year now, and his mother felt that he was settling down.

  When Clive came home that evening at 6:30 P.M., he had a story ready for his mother. Last night he had run into his old friend Richie, who was in the army and home on leave, and they had sat up at Richie’s talking so late, that Richie’s parents had invited him to stay, and Clive had slept on the couch. His mother accepted this explanation. She made a supper of beans, bacon and eggs.

  There was really no one to whom Clive felt like telling his exploit of the night. He couldn’t have borne someone looking at him and saying, “Yeah? Well, so what?” because what he had done had taken a bit of planning, even a little daring. He put Woodrow Wilson’s tie among his others that hung over a string on the inside of his closet door. It was a gray silk tie, conservative and expensive. Several times that day, Clive imagined the two men in the place, or maybe the woman named Mildred, glancing at Woodrow Wilson and exclaiming:

  “Hey! What happened to Woodrow Wilson’s tie, I wonder?”

  Each time Clive thought of this, he had to duck his head to hide his smile.

  After twenty-four hours, however, the exploit had begun to lose its charm and excitement. Clive’s excitement arose only again—and it could arise every day and two or three times a day—when he cycled past the twinkling façade of Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors. His heart would give a leap, his blood would run a little faster, and he would think of all the motionless murders going on in there, and all the stupid faces of Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Q. Public gaping at them. But Clive didn’t even buy another ticket—price sixty-five cents—to go in and look at Woodrow Wilson and see that his tie was missing and his collar button showing—his work.

  Clive did get another idea one afternoon, a hilarious idea that would make the public sit up and take notice. Clive’s ribs trembled with suppressed laughter as he pedaled towards Simmons’s, having just delivered a carton of groceries.

  When should he do it? Tonight? No, best to take a day or so to plan it. It would take brains. And silence. And sure movements—all the things Clive admired. He spen
t two days thinking about it. He went to his local snack bar and drank Coca-Cola and beer, and played the pinball machines with his pals. The pinball machines had pulsating lights, too—MORE THAN ONE CAN PLAY and IT’S MORE FUN TO COMPETE—but Clive thought only of Madame Thibault’s as he stared at the rolling, bouncing balls that mounted a score he cared nothing about. It was the same when he looked at the rainbow-colored jukebox whose blues, reds and yellows undulated, and when he went over to drop a few coins in it. He was thinking of what he was going to do in Madame Thibault’s Waxwork Horrors.

  On the second night, after a supper with his mother, Clive went to Madame Thibault’s and bought a ticket. The old guy who sold tickets barely looked at people, he was so busy making change and tearing off tickets, which was just as well. Clive went in at 9 P.M.

  He looked at the tableaux, though they were not so fascinating to him tonight as usual. Woodrow Wilson’s tie was still missing, as if no one had noticed it, and Clive had a good chuckle over this, which he concealed behind his hand. Clive remembered that the solemn-faced pickpocket-watcher—the drifting snoop—had been the last to leave the night Clive had stayed, so Clive assumed he had the keys, and therefore he ought to be the last to be killed.

  The woman was the first. Clive hid himself beside one of the Iron Molls again, while the crowd oozed out, and as Mildred walked past him, in her hat and coat, to leave via the back door, Clive stepped out and wrapped an arm around her throat from behind.