around me, guarding my back, retreating through the door and locking it.
Upstairs she sits stiffly on her bed. I want to make her answer my questions, to shake her, to force her to help, but I know it will only frighten her more, maybe push her mind down to where I can never reach.
“Mother,” I say to her softly, touching her gently. “What has happened?” My impatience can barely be contained. “Who did this? Where are Meg and Sarah?”
She smiles at me, reassured by the safety of my presence. Still she cannot answer.
“Mother. Please,” I say. “I know how bad it must have been. But you must try to help. I must know where they are so I can help them.”
She says, “Dolls.”
It chills me. “What dolls, Mother? Did a man come here with dolls? What did he want? You mean he looked like a doll? Wearing a mask like one?”
Too many questions. All she can do is blink.
“Please, Mother. You must try your best to tell me. Where are Meg and Sarah?”
“Dolls,” she says.
As I first had the foreboding of disaster at the sight of Sarah’s unrumpled satin bedspread, now I am beginning to understand, rejecting it, fighting it.
“Yes, Mother, the dolls,” I say, refusing to admit what I know. “Please, Mother. Where are Meg and Sarah?”
“You are a grown boy now. You must stop playing as a child. Your father. Without him you will have to be the man in the house. You must be brave.”
“No, Mother.” I can feel it swelling in my chest.
“There will be a great deal of work now, more than any child should know. But we have no choice. You must accept that God has chosen to take him from us, that you are all the man I have left to help me.”
“No, Mother.”
“Now you are a man and you must put away the things of a child.”
Eyes streaming, I am barely able to straighten, leaning wearily against the doorjamb, tears rippling from my face down to my shirt, wetting it cold where it had just begun to dry. I wipe my eyes and see her reaching for me, smiling, and I recoil down the hall, stumbling down the stairs, down, through the sitting room, the kitchen, down, down to the milk, splashing through it to the dollhouse, and in there, crammed and doubled, Sarah. And in the wicker chest, Meg. The toys not on the floor for Sarah to play with, but taken out so Meg could be put in. And both of them, their stomachs slashed, stuffed with sawdust, their eyes rolled up like dolls’ eyes.
The police are knocking at the side door, pounding, calling out who they are, but I am powerless to let them in. They crash through the door, their rubber raincoats dripping as they stare down at me.
“The milk,” I say.
They do not understand. Even as I wait, standing in the milk, listening to the rain pelting on the windows while they come over to see what is in the dollhouse and in the wicker chest, while they go upstairs to my mother and then return so I can tell them again, “The milk.” But they still do not understand.
“She killed them of course,” one man says. “But I don’t see why the milk.”
Only when they speak to the neighbors down the road and learn how she came to them, needing the cans of milk, insisting she carry them herself to the car, the agony she was in as she carried them, only when they find the empty cans and the knife in a stall in the barn, can I say, “The milk. The blood. There was so much blood, you know. She needed to deny it, so she washed it away with milk, purified it, started the dairy again. You see, there was so much blood.”
That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man …
1979
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
SLOWLY, SLOWLY IN THE WIND
Patricia Highsmith (originally Mary Patricia Plangman) (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York as a child, later graduating from Barnard College. Her mother divorced her father five months before she was born, and had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine, so it is not surprising that they did not have a close relationship. Highsmith moved permanently to Europe in 1963, where she enjoyed greater success, both critical and commercial, than in America.
Her first short story, “The Heroine,” was published in
“Slowly, Slowly in the Wind” was Highsmith’s personal favorite of all her stories, according to an introduction she wrote for
Edward “skip” skipperton spentmostofhislifefeelingangry.lt was his nature. When he was a boy he had a bad temper; now, as a man, he was impatient with people who were slow or stupid. He often met such people in his work, which was to give advice on managing companies. He was good at his job: he could see when people were doing something the wrong way, and he told them in a loud, clear voice how to do it better. The company directors always followed his advice.
Now Skipperton was fifty-two. His wife had left him two years ago, because she couldn’t live with his bad temper. She had met a quiet university teacher in Boston, ended her marriage with Skip, and married the teacher. Skip wanted very much to keep their daughter, Maggie, who was then fifteen. With the help of clever lawyers he succeeded.
A few months after he separated from his wife, Skip had a heart attack. He was better again in six months, but his doctor gave him some strong advice.
“Stop smoking and drinking now, or you’re a dead man, Skip! And I think you should leave the world of business, too — you’ve got enough money. Why don’t you buy a small farm and live quietly in the country?”
So Skip looked around, and bought a small farm in Maine with a comfortable farmhouse. A little river, the Coldstream, ran along the bottom of the garden, and the house was called Coldstream Heights. He found a local man, Andy Humbert, to live on the farm and work for him.
