This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith
At that instant David felt he couldn’t have kept the lie up if his life had depended on it. The vision of a nursing home didn’t come to him, he couldn’t think what she was ill with, and he admitted—he had foreseen it in a split second as a casual admission, but in two seconds he had begun to perspire and twitch like a criminal—that his mother really was dead, and that he went to New York on weekends just to get away from Froudsburg and to be alone for a couple of days a week. He said he had made up the story about his mother as the simplest way to avoid social obligations on his weekends, and that as time went on he had not known how to get out of it and had had to embroider it. And he had said he was sorry. Mrs. McCartney had nodded and smiled understandingly and with her head higher than usual had turned away, a proud ship sailing out of his room with her cargo of possible dirty linen.
Then David gathered his nerve, walked out of the house, and telephoned the Beck’s Brook police station from the pharmacy. Soberly and calmly he told them the same story he had just told Mrs. McCartney, his words coming in a steady flow, and he apologized for the discrepancy in his story, but said he had not thought it of any importance. He said that in New York he stayed sometimes with friends and sometimes at a hotel, and that sometimes he went just for a day. His only purpose in going to the city was to get away from Froudsburg, a town he did not care for. It was Sergeant Terry to whom he spoke, and the sergeant seemed to be even amused by the made-up story of the invalid mother.
“As long as you’re not doing this for the purpose of bigamy, Mr. Kelsey,” said Sergeant Terry.
“Never been married even once.”
“You were in New York the Sunday Delaney was killed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Staying where?”
“I didn’t spend the night. I went to a museum and a movie and then drove back to Froudsburg.”
“Were you with anybody? See anybody you knew in New York?”
“No, I didn’t. I was alone.”
“Um-m. See, we told Mrs. Delaney you said you were with your mother, and she told us your mother was dead.”
“Yes.” David knew how it had been. He frowned, gripping the telephone, waiting for the sergeant to add that Mrs. Delaney told them he spent his weekends in his own house.
“Ever see Mrs. Delaney in New York on any of those weekends?”
“No, I did not.”
“Ever try to? Ever ask her to meet you in New York?”
“No,” David replied so calmly, it sounded false. “What’re you getting at, sergeant?”
“Were you ever in love with Mrs. Delaney?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Mr. Kelsey,” with a chuckle, “it’s the only thing that makes any sense. Are you in love with her now?”
David hesitated, protecting not himself but the privacy of his love.
“All right, Mr. Kelsey, is this the reason why Mr. Delaney came to talk to you with a gun?”
“It could be.”
“It must be. Had you ever made any threatening remarks to him, Mr. Kelsey?”
“I certainly did not.”
“You’re sure?”
“You can verify me by asking his wife. The one time I ever spoke to Delaney, she was with us.”
“I see. Well—a darned good thing he didn’t find you that Sunday.”
“That’s what I think too.”
“All right, Mr. Kelsey. Maybe we will verify a few things with Mrs. Delaney.”
“I hope you do, sir,” David said firmly.
When he had stepped from the booth, one of his legs had almost given way under him. That had been Monday. He had thought: Annabelle was in La Jolla, and the police probably wouldn’t take the trouble to telephone her out there in order to check his story. He might have a reprieve of weeks before the ax fell.
But now as he walked the darkening streets of Froudsburg with his aunt’s letter in his pocket, he felt that his life depended on whether Annabelle were in Hartford or not, and it had nothing to do with his conversation with Sergeant Terry. What he had to find out was whether Annabelle had been lying to him in order to avoid seeing him. And after walking the streets for half an hour, he still couldn’t summon the courage to call and find out. The dreary phrases of his aunt’s letter depressed and angered him: Why don’t you give the girl up, Davy? . . . Her parents say she’s just like her grandmother so-and-so who never did marry again though she was only twenty-two when her husband died. The family isn’t good enough for you, Davy. . . . He walked the gloomy streets, taking the darkest ones, as if their heavy shadows might steady him and let him go to that grimy pharmacy and telephone.
He saw the face of a clock in a dimly lighted hand laundry. Seven-ten. Four-ten in California. Which was it? Why did she avoid him? Was she playing a game, and would one day she rush into his arms and laugh and cry and say she loved him and had always loved him? He blew on his cold hands, turned up his coat collar, and pushed his hands back in his pockets. Every man he saw was carrying a bag of groceries, on his way home to his wife. David wondered if he would be able to find a house he liked within driving distance of Dickson-Rand. This time he would live in it seven days a week, no more split life and schizophrenia, no more hiding from half the world. And maybe in three months or in six Annabelle would want to come and live with him. It was unreasonable of him to expect that she would marry him less than a month after her husband died. David felt suddenly so calm and reasonable himself, the prospect of calling her in Hartford and of her answering the telephone began to lose its horror.
A block away a Bell telephone sign projected from the front of Michael’s Tavern. The telephone booth was at the back, directly under a television screen that had not existed the last time David had been here, and which was now crackling with Western gunfire and horses’ hooves. He hesitated a few steps inside the door, replied with a nod to Adolf’s greeting, then went on toward the booth with a determination to make more noise, show a little more life than the television screen. What was ever ideal and perfect anyway? Annabelle would not be in a pink or blue nightgown, as he liked to think of her. Most likely she would have a drooling baby on her lap.
“Dave!” a surprised voice said. “Well, how do you do?” It was Wes, sitting in a booth opposite a woman with brown-streaked blond hair. “Sit down, Dave. This is Helen.”
David’s first thought, not an intelligent one, he immediately realized, was that the woman was Laura, and he had been ready to run. Still flustered, he stammered, “How do you do, Helen?” and did not know how to extricate himself from Wes’s grip on his left wrist.
“Helen, this is my most distinguished colleague, a man who will one day win the Nobel Prize, Mr. David Kelsey, chief engineer of Cheswick Fabrics, but leaving us for better things and greater glory. Sit down, Davy boy.”
Helen chuckled, the red-caked lips parting, and her hand slid forward on the table, ready to take Wes’s again.
“I’m going to make a telephone call,” David said.
“You make it and I’ll order you a drink. Break down, fellow.” He yanked David’s wrist.
Smiling, David twisted his arm, but Wes held on with drunken obduracy. “Nope. Just that call,” David said.
“Isn’t he good looking?” said Helen, as drunk as Wes.
“Calling that girl?” Wes asked with a wink.
David yanked his wrist free and Wes spilled out on the floor. Instantly David had him up again and back on the bench, and Wes’s surprise struggled with anger for a moment, then his lips smiled uncertainly.
“Good grief!” Helen said, edging away from David.
“Davy, old boy, your nerves’re getting you. I said sit down and have a drink. Well, you are calling that girl, aren’t you? Is she going to marry you, Dave? I certainly hope so.”
David could ne
Just as he dialed the operator, the booth door was pulled open.
“Don’t do it, Dave. You’re making a mistake,” Wes said. “Seriously, I’ve been talking with Effie and she says—”
“Let me alone, Wes.” David tugged at the door to close it, but Wes had the door handle and the door barely moved. David sprang up from the seat, got out of the booth, repressed his impulse to lash out with his fists and walked with Wes, who was still talking, back to the booth. Helen smiled at them with unseeing eyes. As soon as Wes had sat down again, David went back to the telephone booth.
The operator was saying, “Hello . . . your call, please . . .” and David told her the number.
Buzz. Click. Jingle-jingle-jingle-jingle, and then he sat staring at the remaining quarter and dime on the little shelf, stiff as a piece of iron, awaiting the voice that would stop the ringing in Hartford. It rang eleven times, which he did not want to count but did, then a voice said, “Hello?”
“Annabelle, this is Dave. You’re really there?”
“Yes, Dave. I—well, my plans about La Jolla—”
“Never mind. I’m glad you’re so close! How’ve you been? I wrote you three letters to La Jolla. Did you get them?”
“I got them. I’m a little out of breath. I just ran up the stairs—You won’t be much longer in Froudsburg, will you?”
“Nine more days. Annabelle, I’m spending next weekend around Troy. I’m going to look for a house, and I was hoping you could come with me. At least Saturday. I could bring you back Saturday night, if you’d prefer that.”
There was a pause, and he said, “I want you to see the lab, Annabelle. The grounds are beautiful. I went up for an interview a few days ago. They’ve accepted me. I told you that in my letters.”
“Dave, I don’t see how I can.”
“Then let me drive by and see you on the way up?”
She made excuses. He interrupted her, pleading. Perhaps on the way back, when he could tell her if he’d found a house. Fifteen minutes even, if he could just come by. He had a little present for her, he said, though he didn’t tell her what it was, and as soon as he mentioned a present he was sorry, lest Annabelle think he felt he had to lure her. Finally he abandoned hope for the weekend and asked when he might see her at any time, any evening.
“I don’t know.”
And though it seemed strange she didn’t know when, he was even more disturbed by the anguish in her voice. “Is there someone there with you?”
“Yes, there is someone.”
Silence. And he didn’t quite believe there was someone with her, because she had said she had run up the steps.
“Dave, I hope you find the kind of house you’re looking for. I’ll be thinking of you. I really ought to go now, because I hear the baby crying.”
He squeezed the telephone, searching frantically for words. “Don’t just go like this. Can I call you tomorrow?”
“All right, Dave. Only I don’t know when I’m going to be in. I have to do some marketing—and I’m out tomorrow evening.”
And what was she doing tomorrow evening? He wanted to know only so he could think of her doing it. “All right, then. I’ll call you Saturday. As soon as I’ve found a house. Would you mind that?”
She said she wouldn’t mind it. They exchanged good-byes, the deadly clichés that put an end to voices. David sat there, trying to breathe slowly before he went out and possibly had another encounter with Wes.
Wes sat with one elbow jutting out, one hand on a thigh, nodding as if he had heard and understood everything. “Well, is she going to marry you? Is she even going to see you?”
Helen laughed emptily.
Because he had not a positive thing to say back, David’s frustration rose like a black cloud before his face. Wes reached out to grab his wrist, and David recoiled. “Don’t touch me!”
He walked to the door and banged it open with the side of his fist.
When he got back to Mrs. McCartney’s, there was a message that Effie Brennan had called and wanted him to call back. David wadded it up and threw it in his wastebasket.
20
Though it might have been suspected at Mrs. McCartney’s that he went to New York to see a girl, Effie Brennan within twenty-four hours had assured Mrs. McCartney that he was in love with a certain girl who lived way up in New England, in fact she thought the girl was going to school in Maine, “so much in love he won’t look at another girl.” Witness herself, David supposed, attractive and willing and not even honored by a movie invitation from David Kelsey. Effie called David again to tell him what she had told Mrs. McCartney, and to ask him if she had not said the right thing. She said that Mrs. McCartney had called her to poke about and ask if she knew what he did on his weekends in New York.
“Thank you. You did say the right thing,” David said, for the first time grateful to Effie, grateful to her for not disclosing Annabelle to the people in the house.
What pained David most, even tortured him, was that Mrs. Beecham knew now that he had no mother, and that the bedjackets she had knitted, the potted plants, the crocheted doilies, and the box of stationery Christmas before last had had no recipient. David had gone to her and apologized, tried to explain, and it had been one of the few times since the age of fourteen that tears had come in his eyes, and all in all with his getting down on one knee to her, he supposed he had made a fool of himself, but Mrs. Beecham was the only one in the house who counted, and he had tried to tell her that. She hadn’t said much, just looked bewildered and disappointed. But on the other hand, David thought with some amusement, his nonexistent mother had sent Mrs. Beecham quite a few presents, too.
The talk of a girl had caused a startling change in the attitude of the people in the house. David knew what they were thinking: not that he had done anything specifically wrong or evil, but that he was a man with clay feet like all the rest, a man in love with a woman whom for some reason he had not yet been able to marry and evidently didn’t even see very often, a man like most others and not a sexless saint. Now their eyes wavered when they looked at his face. They were like children for whom some legend had exploded.
On Saturday morning, David had a letter from Annabelle in the ten o’clock mail. He hoped she had changed her mind about going with him to look for a house, but the letter did not even mention that. Standing in the downstairs hall, he read it quickly, suffered a sense of shame like a slap in the face in public, though no one saw him, stuffed the letter into his pocket, and went out to his car. He had his route planned, and he concentrated on that for a few minutes as he drove. On the dull throughway north, the letter returned to reproach him. Annabelle had said she wished he would not be insistent about seeing her at this time, when she had her hands so full with the child and things to settle up around the house. It was worse than that, and he could not bear to recall the very phrases. Nothing about being questioned by the police. Yet the very coolness of the letter suggested to David that she had been questioned, that she might have told them about his having a house, might have told them about all his letters: Annabelle was not the kind of girl who would write all that out in a letter. Yet wouldn’t the police have tried to see him immediately, if she had told them all that? Wasn’t it more likely that Annabelle would try to hide or minimize those facts in order to make Gerald appear less a killer? David simply didn’t know. But he made a mighty resolution to change his attitude toward Annabelle, to be less importunate, more thoughtful, more patient. He would mail her the little present, a handwoven stole he had found in a store on Main Street, and also the diamond clip, and in Troy he would look for some music books for her, Mozart and Schubert and Chopin and whatever else he could find that she might like.
The house
“Then get it for fifteen thousand,” David said. “I want it.”
“Just like that?” the man asked. “You don’t want to sleep on it?”
David shook his head, smiling, happy. Twenty minutes before, he had been discouraged, thinking he would have to settle for something he was not enthusiastic about. If the agent had not had his office in his home, so that he could be reached on Sunday, he might never have found the house. David said he could make the down payment right away, and that the check would be in the mail that night.
Then he started in a general direction southward, undecided whether to telephone Annabelle, drive to Hartford to see her, or to get his things moved into the house before he told her. The image of the house with woods flanking one side and a fairly well-tended lawn on the other side backgrounded his thoughts, a concrete thing, home, an anchor. Why wouldn’t Annabelle like it? He had not found a single flaw. Wide staircases, generous closets, high ceilings. Thirty years old, and maybe a bastard style, if one wanted to be an architectural snob, but it was unpretentious, it looked more American than English, it was neither formal nor informal.