People Who Knock on the Door Read online

  ADDITIONAL BOOKS BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  PUBLISHED BY W. W. NORTON

  Strangers on a Train

  A Suspension of Mercy

  The Blunderer

  The Glass Cell

  Deep Water

  This Sweet Sickness

  A Dog’s Ransom

  Small g: A Summer Idyll

  Little Tales of Misogyny

  The Animal-Lover’s Guide to Beastly Murder

  Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

  The Black House

  Mermaids on the Golf Course

  The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Ripley Under Ground

  Ripley’s Game

  The Boy Who Followed Ripley

  Ripley Under Water

  The Price of Salt (as Claire Morgan)

  Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

  ADDITIONAL TITLES FROM OTHER PUBLISHERS

  Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (with Doris Sanders)

  A Game for the Living

  The Cry of the Owl

  The Two Faces of January

  Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

  Those Who Walk Away

  The Tremor of Forgery

  The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories

  Edith’s Diary

  Found in the Street

  Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

  People Who

  Knock on the Door

  Patricia Highsmith

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  1

  Arthur flung the stone with calculated aim. It skipped six, seven times over the water before it sank, making golden circles on the pond. As good a throw as when he had been ten years old, he thought, ten being the age at which he had been more proficient at certain things, such as roller-skating backwards. Now he was seventeen.

  He picked up his bike, and rolled on toward home. Today was different. This afternoon had totally changed him, and he realized that as yet he was afraid to think hard about it.

  Was Maggie happy now, too? Less than ten minutes ago, she had smiled at him and said, almost as usual, “See you, Arthur! Bye!”

  He glanced at his watch—5:37. Absurd and boring hour! Absurd to measure time! The May sunshine touched his face; the breeze cooled his body under his shirt. The time 5:37 meant that dinner would be in an hour or so, that his father would come home around 6, pick up the afternoon newspaper and plop himself in the green armchair in the living room. His brother Robbie would be either sulking or bursting a vein with a story of some injustice at school today. Arthur jerked up his front wheel and eased the back one to hurdle a fallen branch on the street.

  Would he look in some way different to his family? Was Maggie wondering the same thing about herself?

  This afternoon was only the second date that he had had with Maggie Brewster, if he wanted to think in terms of dates, and today hadn’t been a date before five past 3, when Maggie had said to him, after biology class, “Do you know what Cooper means about that Plasmodium drawing?” “The life-cycle,” Arthur had replied. “He doesn’t want it from any diagram, in case we find one. He showed us the shape of it. He wants to make sure we understand spore reproduction.” So Arthur had offered to help her, and had ridden to Maggie’s house on his bike. Maggie had her own car and arrived ahead of him. In Maggie’s room upstairs in her family’s house, Arthur had drawn the life-cycle of this malarial parasite in about ten minutes. “I’m sure this’ll do,” Arthur said, “and I’ll reverse my own drawing when I make it.” Then he stood up from her table, and Maggie had been standing near him. The next moments were too surprising or incredible to try to go over as yet. It was easier to recall his first date with Maggie six days ago; they had simply gone to a movie, a science fiction movie. During the film, he had been too shy to try to take her hand! But that was the kind of girl Maggie was, or the way she made him feel. He hadn’t wanted to ruin everything, possibly, by taking her hand during the movie and having her withdraw her hand because she wasn’t in the mood. Arthur felt that he had been in love with Maggie, from a distance, for at least two weeks. And judging from this afternoon, perhaps Maggie was in love with him too. Wonderful and incredible!

  Arthur put his bike in the garage and entered the kitchen, “Hi, Mom!” He caught the smell of baking ham.

  “Hello, Arthur.—Gus just phoned.” His mother turned from something she was stirring on the stove. “I said I was expecting you back any minute.”

  Arthur was thinking of buying a bike from Gus. “Not important. Thanks, Mom.” In the living room, his father was already installed in the armchair, Arthur saw. “Good evening, brother Robbie, and how’re you today?” Arthur asked the skinny figure in shorts whom he met in the hall.

  “Okay,” Robbie said, gasping. He was wearing one black flipper and had the other in his hand.

  “Glad to hear that,” said Arthur, and went into the bathroom. Arthur washed his face in cold water, combed his hair, and checked himself in the mirror. His eyes, of a dusty blue color, looked the same, he thought. He straightened the collar of his shirt and went out.

  “Evening, Dad,” Arthur said, going into the living room.

  “Um-m. Hi.” His father barely glanced at him over his right shoulder. He was reading the spread pages of the Chalmerston Herald.

  Richard Alderman was a life-insurance and retirement-plan salesman for a company called Heritage Life, which had its offices on the other side of Chalmerston, four miles away. He was a hard-working and well-meaning man, in Arthur’s opinion, but in the last year or so, Arthur had come to think that his father was selling dreams to his clients, promises of a future that might never be. His father’s pitch, Arthur knew, was that diligent work and conscientious saving paid off, combined with tax shelters and tax-free retirement plans. Lately Arthur was much aware of inflation; he heard the word from his mother almost every time she got back from shopping, but whenever Arthur said anything along these lines, his father would point out that the people who invested with Heritage Life were saving on taxes and had spouses or children to whom they would bequeath their holdings, so nothing was lost. Except the value of the dollar, Arthur thought. Arthur believed in buying land or art objects, neither of which detracted from the virtue or necessity of working hard and so on. Some of these thoughts drifted through Arthur’s head now: Suppose he and Maggie liked each other enough to want to marry one day? The Brewsters had more money than his family had. That was an uncomfortable fact.

  A yell from Robbie interrupted his reverie.

  “I can do it if you just let me!” Robbie shrieked in a still unchanged voice.

  “Ar—thur?” his mother called. “Dinner’s ready.”

  “Dinner, Dad,” Arthur relayed, in case his father hadn’t heard it.

  “Oh. Um. Thanks.” Richard got up, and for the first time that evening looked straight at his son. “Well, Arthur. You look as if you’ve grown another inch today.”

  “Yeah, really?” Arthur didn’t believe him, but was pleased by the idea.

  The dining table stood at one side of the big kitchen, near a bench fixed against a partition between kitchen and the front hall. There was a chair at one end of the table and one on its kitchen side.

  Arthur’s father talked about business, because Lois had asked him how things had gone today. His father talked also about morale—how to maintain “morale and self-respect
,” a phrase that his father uttered frequently.

  “There are lots of tricks,” said his father with a glance at Arthur, “telling yourself you’ve had a pretty good day, congratulating yourself—trying to—on some minor achievement. It’s the nature of man to want to make progress. But that’s pretty thin air compared to money in the bank and a backlog or an investment that’s growing year by year . . .”

  Or a girl in your arms, Arthur thought. What could compare with that, speaking of morale? Opposite him, his mother looked her usual self, her short brown hair something between combed and uncombed, her roundish face without makeup, showing the start of wrinkles, little pouches under the eyes, but a bright and happy face all the same, concentrating politely now on his father’s dull monologue.

  Robbie ate doggedly, shoving his fork under morsels of baked ham which he had cut up in pieces. Robbie was left-handed. His fair eyebrows scowled under a smooth, babyish forehead, as if eating were a chore, though he had a fantastic appetite. His torso was narrow; his ribs showed in summertime when he wore shorts with an elastic waistband, and threadlike muscles appeared on his abdomen when he grew angry or when he yelled.

  “Dining in flippers tonight?” Arthur asked his brother.

  Robbie lifted his gray eyes and blinked. “So what if I am?”

  “Going to practice in the bathtub tonight?”

  “Need them for swimming class tomorrow,” Robbie replied.

  “I can see you getting on the school bus in them tomorrow. Flop-flop-flop.” Arthur wiped his lips with a paper napkin. “You’ll sleep in ’em, I suppose, or you can’t get ’em back on tomorrow!”

  “Who says I can’t?” Robbie said through clenched teeth.

  “Arthur, do stop,” said their mother.

  “I was about to say,” Richard went on, “the stock selling—in real estate for community projects—is coming in nicely for us, Loey. Good commissions, need I say.”

  “But I don’t understand to whom you sell them,” said Lois. “The same people who have life insurance buy these stocks?”

  “Yes. Often. What you’d call little people, not millionaires. I was about to say my people are the little people, but that’s not always true. Fifty thousand dollars here and there, you bet they can afford it—or pledge it—if my approach is right and the terms are right for them.”

  His mother asked another question, and Arthur’s mind drifted. The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example. His father was talking about “security” again.

  Arthur felt extremely secure at that moment, maybe not because of his savings account in which there was just a little over two hundred, but money wasn’t the only basis of security, was it? “Dad,” he said, “isn’t self-confidence a form of security, too? It’s close to self-respect, isn’t it? And you’re always talking about that.”

  “Yes. I agree with you. Part of it’s mental. But a steady and rising income, however modest—” Richard seemed embarrassed by his own seriousness, glanced at Lois and squeezed her wrist. “And a quiet, God-fearing life or home life—that’s security, too, isn’t it, Loey?”

  The telephone rang.

  Both Lois and Arthur started to get up, but his mother sat down, saying, “Maybe Gus again, Arthur.”

  “Scuse me,” said Arthur, sidling out from the bench after Robbie had got up. “Hello?” he said into the telephone.

  “Hello,” said Maggie’s soft voice, and Arthur felt a pleasant shock of surprise.

  “Hi. You’re okay, Maggie?”

  “Yes. Why not?—I’m phoning from upstairs, because I have a minute before dinner. I—”

  “What?” Arthur was whispering.

  “I think you’re very nice.”

  Arthur squeezed his eyes shut, “I think I love you.”

  “Maybe I love you, too. That’s a very important thing to say, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “See you tomorrow.” She hung up.

  Arthur went back to the kitchen with a solemn face. “Gus,” he said.

  Before 9 o’clock, Arthur was in his own room. He was not interested in the evening’s TV fare, a Western that Robbie was avid to see. His mother was going to do some mending, she said, and his father would half-watch the Western for a while, then go off to his study adjacent to the living room and fuss around with his office papers till nearly 11.

  His room struck him as ugly and untidy, and he picked up a pair of socks from the floor and hurled them in the direction of the closet. Pennants on the wall caught his eye as if he had never seen them before. Soon time to get rid of the Chalmerston High School orange and white, he thought, and why not now? He pulled the three thumbtacks out carefully and dropped the pennant in the wastebasket. The blue and white Columbia could stay up, because he was going to Columbia in September and Columbia looked serious and adult. He was going to major in biology or maybe microbiology. He was just as interested in zoology, however, and in the evolution of animal forms. He would have to make a decision in order to specialize, and he regretted that.

  Maggie! The thought of her sent a blissful shock through him, as her voice had on the telephone. Arthur had thought in the past weeks, since he began noticing Maggie in school, that she was standoffish, possibly snobbish, hard to approach. Ninety percent of the girls at Chalmerston High looked fantastically boring; ten percent slept around and flaunted it; perhaps another twenty percent did and were quieter about it. The greatest flaunter of them all was Roxanne, who looked half-Gypsy but was not even half-Italian. Then there were a few snooty girls from such rich families, one wondered why they weren’t going to a private school somewhere. Maggie wasn’t like any of these; she had the advantage of being pretty, very pretty in fact, and she certainly didn’t sleep around. This afternoon with Maggie had been quite different from going off with Roxanne, for instance, after a soda at the drugstore, with a couple of other girls and fellows who happened to know that the parents of one of them would be out of the house that afternoon. Half the time at these silly free-for-alls nothing much happened anyway, and it was all silly, to be forgotten.

  But Maggie was not to be forgotten, because she was serious.

  Arthur undressed, put on pajamas, and lay on his bed with his geography text open. He had an oral exam tomorrow.

  From the living room, he heard Robbie wail defiantly, then a sharp crack, and silence. His mother would never slap Robbie, but maybe his mother had slapped a magazine on a table with impatience. A scene came from Arthur’s memory: Robbie about seven, wailing like mad because a little girl had stepped smack into his sandwich at a picnic. There’d been no comforting Robbie, even with another sandwich. His face had turned red; he had danced on his bare feet and brandished his fists in his tense, jerky way, and Arthur remembered the veins standing out as if they would burst on either side of his neck.

  Arthur took a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen and wrote:

  Dearest Maggie,

  Thank you for calling me up tonight. I wish I could kiss you again. I love you. I mean what I say.

  A.

  After writing that, he felt calmer. Tomorrow he could pass the note to her easily, not that anyone was spying on him and Maggie, or making rude comments. That was another pleasant realization.

  Chalmerston High School was a rectangular beige stone building set amid oaks and tulip trees that had been there longer than the building. A gymnasium with an arched roof projected from the back of the building like the apse of a church, and was in almost constant use during daytime hours by boys or girls, and on at least three evenings a week for special basketball practice or for games between Chalmerston’s and other high schools’ teams.

  Arthur left his bike in a rack among a hundred or more others.

  “Stevy? Hi!” said Arthur, waving a hand at a tall, c
urly-haired boy. He loped up the wide stone steps and entered the poster-covered front hall, which was now full of noisy boys and girls passing the time until the warning bell at five to 9 sent them off to their homerooms for attendance checking.

  He did not see Maggie until just before 11, when students crowded the corridors, changing classrooms. He spotted Maggie’s light brown straight hair, her erect figure with shoulders held back. She was taller than most girls, nearly as tall as he. “Maggie—”

  “Hello, Arthur!”

  They walked along. “How are you?” Arthur’s free hand—his other hand held books and notebooks—fumbled with the folded note in his pocket.

  “Fine. And you?”

  He had expected her to say something unusual. His eyes dropped past her breasts, held in a brassiere, he knew, under her white shirt, down her rust-colored corduroy slacks, then rose to her face again. “Brought you this.” He pushed the folded paper into the hand she extended. “Just a couple of words.”

  “Thanks, I’ll—” A passing student bumped her shoulder. She put the note into the pocket of her shirt.

  “Going to the drugstore at three?”

  “Maybe. Yes, okay.”

  It seemed to Arthur that her smile was merely polite, that her quick glance at him was shy. Was she ashamed of yesterday, regretting it? “See you at three then.”

  Arthur could have spoken to her again at noon in the lunch hall, but by the time Arthur had his tray, he saw that Maggie was installed with at least four other girls at a back corner table. Arthur found an empty spot at one of the long tables in the center of the hall and sat down.

  “Hiya, Art,” said Gus, suddenly standing by Arthur with a tray in his hands. “Move over, would you?” Gus said to a fellow on Arthur’s right. “You didn’t call me yesterday,” Gus said, sitting down.

  “I got hung up. Sorry, Gus.”

  “Still interested? Thirty bucks?”

  “Sure!”

  They agreed that Arthur would come that afternoon at 5 to Gus’s house to pick up the bike. Gus had to go directly from school to work for at least an hour at someone’s house. A repair job. Gus even did some housecleaning sometimes, Arthur knew. There were five children in Gus’s family, of whom Gus was the oldest, and those old enough had to do odd jobs to bring in some money. Arthur had a lurking admiration for that, even though it was just the thing his father would praise: old-fashioned hard work and knowing the value of a dollar. If Arthur had ever done odd jobs for neighbors, he had been allowed to pocket the money. Arthur envied Gus his height also, though otherwise Gus was plain enough: lank blond hair, an unremarkable face with a rather gentle expression, and he had to wear glasses all the time. Physically, Gus was strong, but Arthur knew that girls never looked at him twice. In that last respect, Arthur felt better off than Gus Warylsky. Impossible, really impossible, to imagine Gus with a girl!