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The Cake that was Shaped Like a Coffin

Part 7

People are drawn to closure, and demand it (usually in vain) of both art and life. And so the stories about Pat Highsmith’s death, her cremation, and her memorial service in the Catholic church in Tegna—as well as the halo of blurred memories evoked by these events—tend to have an obituarial tinge. They are gentle stories, curtain tales, and they put a softly rendered end to the sundered psychologies and murderous passions, the bad motives and good intentions, and the infernal filiation of paradoxes, hesitations, cruelties, seductions, successes, prejudices, and surprising kindnesses that made up the character of the talented Miss Highsmith. Pat’s former publisher Otto Penzler was the exception amongst her editors to give an unambiguously unfavorable opinion of the dead, but there was one other exception as well: the distinguished American editor and man of letters who leaned over me in a Paris bookstore and whispered, feelingly and off the record, “I loathed her.”

Soon after Pat’s death, Barbara Skelton, that tempestuous femme fatale who had been Pat’s neighbor in the Île-de-France, “was visited by a small owl of intense beauty, its eyes sparkling with wisdom.” The owl came down the chimney of Skelton’s stone house in the Seine-et-Marne and perched on her windowsill, staying for two days. Skelton thought the owl had something to do with Pat and that it was bringing a message to her: “Have no fear! This is my afterlife and ergo, it’s not so bad, is it!”¹

Daniel Keel chose a poignant and spare little poem about a flowering tree taken from Edith’s Diary to print in the program for Pat’s memorial service, and he read out another poem written by Pat—somewhat uncharacteristically celebrating the efforts of underdogs (successful underdogs like van Gogh, however)—during the service itself. The critic Peter Ruedi, in his funeral oration, laid to rest the distinction without a difference that had dogged Pat’s work since Strangers on a Train was published in 1950: “So let us waste not another word on the ridiculous differentiation between the crime-thriller and literature. It is one which never troubled her readers, but merely those people who would try to pull the wool over their eyes and tell them that black was white.” And then he quoted the great literary philosopher Walter Benjamin’s description of Robert Walser’s work as the “most appropriate thing that can be said about the finest of [Highsmith’s] characters: ‘They emerge, out of the night, where it is at its blackest, a Venetian night if you like, a night lit by feeble lanterns of hope, with something of a festive sparkle in their eyes, but distraught and so sad as to make you weep.’”²

Tanja Howarth, Pat’s former Diogenes’ representative in London, in an attempt to “get close to Pat” after her death, spent a terribly disturbed night at the Storchen Hotel in Zurich where Pat used to stay. Her room—it was the room Pat always took and it was referred to by the hotel staff as belonging to “the lady with the typewriter”—was haunted, Howarth was sure, by the spirit of a disgruntled Highsmith, who was not at all pleased with this postmortem attempt at intimacy. But Howarth also tells a story about how, during the memorial service in Tegna, the little train to Domodosilla passed right alongside the churchyard and all the young “strangers on the train” waved cheerily to all the friends, fans, and dignitaries who were assembled to honor Pat.³

The day of Pat’s memorial service, 11 March 1995, was “a glorious day, cold and crisp, the sort of day where you wonder: Would I like to be buried on a day like this? Blue skies and crisp weather suited Pat so much better.” ⁴

The little church in Tegna was filled: local people from the village had gathered, and Daniel Keel made sure that publishers, editors, and journalists flew in from all over Europe. It was, said one mourner, “a big hoopla,”⁵ with Pat’s publishers from Italy, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany all represented, but not the United States, where Pat’s last American editor, Gary Fisketjon, “after tearing my hair out about it,” had finally rejected Small g: A Summer Idyll in July of 1994. “It was a trifle of a trifle,” he says regretfully. “[C]areless and left-handed…to publish [it] would be to set us back years.”⁶ Pat wrote him back, saying that she didn’t take the rejection “personally.” But she reminded him—since Fisketjon was now at Knopf and Pat was still counting—that this was, by the way, her “second rejection” by Knopf.⁷

Peter Huber—it was his memorial tribute—sported the red vest Pat had bought him from L.L. Bean to wear on 1 August, the Swiss national day—“Very red,” he says, “the national color of Switzerland.”⁸ Pat had also bought a twin of the vest for herself, just as she had kept her double of Daniel Keel’s coat. Doubling was the theme of her life, as it had been the theme of her work.

The only ex-lover who might have come to Pat’s memorial service—the only one who had been invited—was Ellen Blumenthal Hill, and she had refused to come, telling the journalist Joan Dupont that she’d had “trouble with Miss Highsmith” in the last years. Daniel Keel, who organized the service, and Pat’s local friends in the Ticino who had done some of the inviting, knew next to nothing of Pat’s past life. Kingsley Skattebol, Pat’s last connection with her American past and her oldest friend, had also been kept out of many of Pat’s affairs and affections: she had never met most of the women friends and ex-lovers Pat was corresponding with now, and she knew only the pieces of Pat’s life which touched upon her own—and even some aspects of these came as a surprise to her after Pat’s death. The biggest surprise, says Kingsley, was that Pat had been a member of the Young Communists when they were at Barnard College together. Kingsley had never suspected it.

“Pat and I were on the same wavelength but not in the same orbit,” says Kingsley. A starry-eyed sixteen-year-old freshman when she met the rather superior nineteen-year-old upperclasswoman that was Pat Highsmith at Barnard College in 1940, Kingsley “knew right away Pat was brilliant.” Sixty-odd years later, she was still counting Pat as “the most important relationship of my life.”⁹

The results of Pat’s silence about her past were all too visible at her memorial: the writer who had spent so much of her life dying for love (metaphorically) and also killing for it (symbolically) had neither family members nor old lovers at her memorial service in Tegna. None of the women Pat had loved and hated in the United States, in France, in England, or in Germany were there to remember her. It was Kingsley, Pat’s platonic friend for fifty-five years, who carried the urn with Pat’s ashes in a processional to the columbarium. It seemed to Bert Diener a “breathtaking [act], the maximum you could experience as a human being. She was walking in a trance, sort of floating.” Tanja Howarth thought Kingsley looked like a “Greenham Common woman,” wrapped up in her big anorak, and watched her “put the urn in the anorak and zip it up. It was like carrying a baby and she was sobbing as she carried it to the cemetery and put it in the little niche.” Kingsley, who says that with Pat as her friend she “needed no other,” thinks that she was perhaps weeping silently, but not openly, as she took up the urn for the solemn procession and that her walk to the columbarium “was, in any case, one of the worst moments of my life.”¹⁰

There was someone at the church who was weeping openly for Pat, however, and that person was an alien in the crowd, a stranger. Uninvited, he had placed a framed photograph of Pat cradling one of her cats into the niche where her urn was being sealed up. When asked, he said no, he’d never met Patricia Highsmith, but he had “read all her books.” That’s why he was weeping.¹¹ Three decades before her death, Pat, an alien and a stranger to almost everything herself, had made a similar pilgrimage. Standing in front of Oscar Wilde’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery on a bright July day in 1962, her eyes welling with tears, she’d read “those great and most biting lines” inscribed on Oscar’s monument: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity’s long-broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men / And outcasts always mourn.”¹² Liz Calder, Pat’s publisher from Bloomsbury who had taken the train from Zurich with Tanja Howarth, handed out English-language copies of Pat’s last novel, the posthumously published Small g: A Summer Idyll. And so everyone went home with a memorial program and “with something that was Pat.”

Daniel Keel, with an eye to posterity, had arranged to have the ceremony filmed for German television—just as he had invited a documentary filmmaker, Philippe Kohly, into Pat’s house before it was dismantled. There were cables uncoiling everywhere in the small church, and, says one guest, “the television people ran all over everything like rats. The urn stood on a plain refectory table and I was convinced they were going to knock it over with their cables. And I thought that would be just like Pat, her ashes splattered everywhere. But it didn’t happen.” Frieda Sommer, one of Pat’s executors and another of her “good eggs,” the woman who had done much of the Zurich research for Small g, was the most visibly struck by Pat’s death. Tanja Howarth, curious about the burial arrangements, asked some pertinent questions of the local officials about just how you get yourself a niche in a wall in a Swiss columbarium. The responses they gave sound like a paraphrase of Pat’s lifelong problems with her possessions.

“You have to be a great member of the community” is what Howarth says she was told, “and you have to pay a lot of money and of course the urn behind yours has to be taken out, so you’re displacing someone. They can’t drill into the mountain forever.”¹³

No information is currently available as to whether or not Patricia Highsmith’s urn occupies a space that had previously been the resting place of a good Swiss citizen. But there is something appropriate in raising the possibility of such a substitution. The switching of one urn for another is a keime of which Pat would have made gleeful artistic use; urn burial (with a twist) is a fine subject for a Highsmith short story.

Just as good a subject for a Highsmith story would have been the little comedy of official errors that transpired shortly after Pat died. Bert Diener, in the house next door, was the recipient of the 6:30 A.M. telephone call on Saturday, the fourth of February, that announced Pat’s death. When the owner of a Swiss house expires, the house’s contents must be assessed and certified for tax purposes, and the dwelling is immediately sealed up with sealing wax—like a letter that will never be sent. So Diener-Diethelm called the “Syndical” early in the morning to report Pat’s death, thereby provoking an “incident” with the local authorities, who found they couldn’t shut up the house with Marylin Scowden, Pat’s accountant, staying in it. Two of the three officials wanted to lock Scowden out. “Local politics,” says Bert Diener, “they thought in this house was a lot of money and riches beyond imagination.”¹⁴

Pat Highsmith’s life was full of repetitions, and this last little contretemps over property and possession seems to be another one, reprising the douane’s disturbing raid on her house in Moncourt fifteen years before. But this time, as though to confirm the Marxian formulation, history came back as farce and not as tragedy and the Casa Highsmith resisted the invasion as though it were still inhabited by the spirit of its owner. Wherever the officials tried to put their sealing wax, which was, apparently, the wrong kind of wax—on the walls, on the lintels, on the doors themselves—it wouldn’t stick; the substance slid sloppily down towards the floor. In the end, says Diener, they “just gave up.” They put the things they judged valuable—eccentric choices including Pat’s many-volumed, leather-bound edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—into one room and hung “some sort of official ribbon on the door handle.”¹⁵ And that was that.^*

Except, of course, that it wasn’t. It took eight long years to settle the estate of Mary Patricia Highsmith, which—with its twists and turns of tax laws and unexpected surcharges, its fiduciary blind alleys, its unknown investments in various countries and odd trusts in several currencies, its “alien” signatory who had simply been unable do the “sensible” thing and give up her estate to Yaddo before she died—turned out to be just as eccentric as its namesake.^*

Pat did manage to keep everyone in the dark about how much money she had. When she invited her neighbor Vivien De Bernardi to be a financial administrator of her estate (Vivien’s husband, Renata, was a banker), Vivien had “no idea” what Pat’s innocent request would entail.

“‘Would you be my executor? I have an account with ten thousand dollars, is this enough?’ And then,” says Vivien, “later I find out she had six million Swiss francs!^* Everyone got just a little glimpse through the window. Pat never gave everyone the full picture.”

Donald Rice, the tax attorney and Yaddo board chairman who spent a long time “guiding” Pat on her bequest to Yaddo, says: “I did know how much money Pat had—but what to believe and where it was, was yet another issue.”

It was Pat who launched the typically complicated exchanges she would have with Yaddo in the last three years of her life, exchanges which provided her with the kind of fun she liked best, the kind that turns everything upside down. Pat had written to Yaddo’s then-director, Myra Sklarew, wondering if Yaddo would accept the testamentary gift of her new house in Tegna as a kind of “Yaddo in Switzerland.” Then, “little by little,” says Sklarew, “she began to send checks to Yaddo in torn envelopes.”¹⁶ Myra Sklarew passed Pat’s suggestion on to Don Rice, with whom, by 1992, Pat was having intense conversations about financial matters, and Rice saw that the Tegna house wouldn’t do as a colony: it was too small, too eccentric, and there was no money to maintain it. When Mike Sundell took over the Yaddo directorship, he got in touch with Pat in 1993 as a matter of courtesy. On the alert, she told him “curtly that she was ‘not going to increase her contribution to Yaddo.’” Sundell responded that “she was being quite generous already,” and, by the way, he and his wife, the art historian Nina Sundell, would be in Italy during that summer and could he take her to lunch. Pat was “agreeable” to being taken to lunch.¹⁷

The year Pat’s relations with Yaddo began to thicken, 1992, was also the year in which she began, laboriously, to work on Small g, the only long fiction she would set in Switzerland. She’d written, hopefully, to Liz Calder that the city at the center of the novel she was thinking about, Zurich, “can be a violent town,”¹⁸ but before she started the book in March, she was presented with a serious intimation of mortality: another operation. It was the prelude to a long series of hospital stays.

Pat had been having bad pains in her left leg, her “smoker’s leg,” for some time, and in January of 1992 she finally went to London to get it looked at. Her friend the actress Heather Chasen accompanied her to the Royal Free Hospital for her checkup, and then Pat went on to see a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition. The only thing Pat noticed about the art was that every single print had a round or square stamp on it “so that no thief could steal it”:¹⁹ she was still on the lookout for life’s little felonies. On 19 January, Chasen gave a tea party at her mews house near Harley Street for Pat’s seventy-first birthday. Amongst the guests were Heather’s son Rupert, with whom Pat had “interesting conversations” the actor Jonathan Kent, who had taken over the directorship of the Almeida Theatre; the writer Jill Robinson, daughter of former M-G-M studio head Dore Schary; and four or five other people. “It wasn’t friends of Pat’s,” says Heather Chasen; “there weren’t many left.”²⁰ Liz Calder picked Pat up from the tea party and took her to dinner at her house. Pat made a note of Calder’s “light-green” parrot—“maybe 38,” she guessed at his age, still fascinated by numbers—and nothing else.²¹

During the operation on her leg the following day, Pat’s left femoral artery was “ballooned” out (Pat wrote down, as always, a minute description of the procedure), the operation was a success, and her surgeon, Mr. Hamilton, told her: “Well, you were lucky.” “I feel lucky,” Pat replied.

Back in Tegna, Pat started writing Small g in the spring of 1992, sending letters to her sometime neighbor, Julia Diener-Diethelm, who owned a dressmaking business in Zurich (and who altered Pat’s clothes for no charge) about apprenticeships in fashion and about inheritance, since the book turned on the inheritance of a fashion business. Frieda Sommer was Pat’s proxy researcher on the Zurich gay scene.

On 10 October 1992, Pat was back in the United States visiting “brother Dan” at Box Canyon Ranch, “now my only family-connected house in Texas,”²² and, as she usually did in conservative Texas, Pat slipped into her vocal role as a political “liberal.” She criticized Dan and his wife Florine’s lack of books, their old-fashioned ways, and, most sharply, their conservative politics: the very politics Pat herself would instantly adopt whenever she came face-to-face with anything that resembled a New York “liberal.” Pat had expressed great admiration for Margaret Thatcher, and she’d voted for George Bush in his initial presidential run, telling a British journalist that she hoped Bush would “take a more realistic stand about the situation in Palestine.”²³ A month after visiting Dan and Florine, still horrified by the violence of the Los Angeles riots in April of 1992 that followed the police beating of Rodney King (King, out on parole for robbery, had a history of spousal abuse and drunk driving), Pat “voted Perot [a Texan, an independent, and a fiscal conservative], feeling sure Clinton would win.”²⁴

But Pat had already experienced “the glaring truth” of American violence a little closer to home: her “brother Dan,” suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had been stabbed in Weatherford, Texas, in 1990 “on his own property” for no discernible reason by someone he didn’t know. Pat’s stay in Texas in 1992 made the incident real for her, and she wrote about it as though it had just happened, “criminalizing” and complicating the behavior of the local police in her own special way. “[T]he local police were (and are) too afraid to bring the culprit to justice, because he is in the drug racket, & either the police are being paid off, or are too afraid for their own lives to tackle the problem.”²⁵

From Texas, Pat, who had been invited to appear at the Harbourfront festival in Toronto, flew to Canada in the middle of October. There she met Margaret Atwood, one of the handful of women writers whose work she had reviewed. (Pat felt she could forgive the feminism of The Handmaid’s Tale in light of the novel’s undeniable power.) But the focal point of her trip to North America was the nine days she’d spent in New York before she went on to Texas and Canada. Three of those days were passed at Marijane Meaker’s house in East Hampton, Long Island, during which Pat soaked herself in alcohol; behaved, according to Meaker, like a social terrorist; and produced a series of remarks that would make her “conservative” Texas relatives sound like committed Trotskyites.

Pat had decided to add New York to her Texas and Toronto itinerary so that she could have more dental work done, and at the last possible moment her editor, Gary Fisketjon, called Bob Lemstrom-Sheedy, the publicist for the Rizzoli Bookstore in SoHo—one of the “hot” places to do readings in Manhattan in the early 1990s—to ask if he could set something up for Ripley Under Water. It would be Pat’s last professional appearance in the United States.

The ads, says Bob Lemstron-Sheedy, went up on a Tuesday, the reading took place on a Thursday, and the bookstore was completely packed with people. Pat arrived with a woman friend and read sections from each of the four preceeding Ripleys, setting them up in her “marvellous, deep, gravelly voice.” She didn’t speak extemporaneously, but read from notes typed on a very thin piece of onionskin.²⁶

She began by introducing The Talented Mr. Ripley.

“I was on my balcony in Positano very early in the morning, and way down below on the beach I saw a young man walking, in Madras shorts with a towel around his neck; it was”—here she paused dramatically, and everyone expected her to say Tom Ripley, because that had always been her shorthand explanation to the press about how she’d conjured up Tom—“Dickie Greenleaf!”²⁷

Pat was very professional in her signing, and people waited eagerly in a long line to get her signature. She knew how to handle herself personally. “I don’t want to sit down anymore,” she said, and went to sign books at the bar, where the bookstore had arranged a little collation. “Too tired,” she said.²⁸

Then Gary Fisketjon took everyone out to the Odeon for dinner and Pat continued talking in her “marvellous voice.” She drank glass after glass of whiskey, ordered a hamburger and mashed potatoes, made her usual fuss over the food because the potatoes were, she said, “cold,” and then performed her customary acte gratuite at a dinner table: Bob Lemstrom-Sheedy watched her stub out her ever-present Gauloise in the potatoes. Still, he says, “I’ve seen everything in authors, believe me, from the obsessional to the hysterical—but I thought she was terrific, a real professional.”²⁹

Pat was also taken to Scribner’s bookstore for a shelf signing. Scribner’s was run by Lemstrom-Sheedy’s wife, Kaarin, who had just read Edith’s Diary and told Pat what a wonderful book she thought it was. And Pat said immediately: “Yes, I don’t know how I did that.”³⁰

Because Pat was thinking about leaving her house in Tegna to Yaddo as an art colony, she took the opportunity while she was in New York to meet with Don Rice in his law offices. “So,” says Rice, “as we talked the thing through—with her smoking Gauloises, in violation of every extant law and some intermittent complaints from people walking down the hall—we talked about the impossibility of this thing and her interest in wanting to be a benefactor.”

As Rice got to know Pat, he began to think of her “self-presentation” as someone from “the English moors. The way she was dressed in a heavy tweed something or other, lots of material, lots of layers, strong smell of tobacco and the gravelly voice. I mean I liked her…and I think she trusted me.”³¹

Pat’s sporadic work on Small g—the novel she’d hoped would tell a “current” story—was the work of an ill and intermittently exhausted woman; Pat wrote her way through it between hospital diagnoses and the many intrigues she was hatching in life for the disposal of her wordly goods. Small g was another Highsmith “fairy tale” whose plot would mutedly summarize (rather than dramatize) all her themes. Viewed in terms of the rest of her work, the novel might be considered—not entirely facetiously—as the “classic comic book” version of a Highsmith novel.

Presenting a cavalcade of recognizably Highsmithian characters, it begins with an incidental murder, ends with an accidental death, and highlights: bisexual relations; a series of forged identities; the sexual idealization of youth; hoaxed and entrapped situations; the specter of AIDS (another hoax); and a clubfooted “witch,” Renata Hagnauer, who has a fashion business, a mentally deficient henchman, and a semierotic attachment to Luisa, the “fairy-tale princess” who is also Renata’s beautiful young apprentice. It again features what is probably one of Ellen Blumenthal Hill’s dogs—the white poodle. It is the same dog for whom Ellen, a few years after Pat’s death, would prepare the same killing pills she herself took when she came to the characteristically disciplined decision that she was too old and too ill to go on living.^*32

But what Small g obviously lacks as a novel is what Pat herself had almost given up on by now: the overarching idea of the “double.”

Small g has a happier ending than its murderous beginning promises: Rudi Markwalder, the aging gay male protagonist, doesn’t have AIDS; everyone ends up sleeping with someone; and no one kills the dog. Still, Pat did not hesitate to frighten Renata Hagnauer down the stairs to her death—an accidental murder by the novel’s merry band of pranksters—so that her assistant, Luisa, can inherit her fashion business. Murder and malevolence are not entirely erased from this final work, but, like its author’s other deep feelings, they are half extinguished by the book’s material concerns. Pat was a long way from the summer of 1955, when, “sick” with emotion and alight with inspiration, she wrote Tom Ripley’s murder of Dickie Greenleaf as an act that was indistinguishable from love.

Nonetheless, the desire to stalk and keep secrets, the obsession with pursuit and threat, the flirtation with forgery and “getting away with it”—all of which had sustained Pat’s fictions for five decades—were still alive in her imagination. And it is with these themes that Pat made her last, truly characteristic work, a creation that was much more representative of Highsmith at the height of her powers than this newer, tamer, timelier novel—Small g—whose writing was costing her so much effort. It was a final hurrah for Pat—this flaring up of old obsessions—and she enjoyed it enormously. But instead of consigning her inspiration to the pages of a notebook or a new fiction, she used it to light up her life, acting out, intermittently and in her own character, the transgressive motifs into which she had always poured everything, including her love. And so Pat began to bend the relationship that was blossoming between herself and Yaddo towards all the themes she had left undeveloped in Small g.

Just as she’d done when she was writing The Price of Salt, Pat started to play stalking games with Donald Rice, turning the magnificent possibility of her bequest to Yaddo (it was finally three million dollars: the largest bequest ever made by a former Yaddo resident, the cornerstone of Yaddo’s capital campaign, and an encouragement to other Yaddo colonists to make similar bequests) into an elaborate game of pursuit, escape, and disguise. Coincidentally, Rice, who was looking at Pat’s work in an attempt to get to know her better, read The Price of Salt, which he “thought was brilliant and very, very touching. It may be my favorite book of hers. That’s when I became aware of her sexuality and it was so subtle in that book, so beautifully portrayed.”³³

It was an unlikely pairing, Donald Rice and Patricia Highsmith, and it had the unlikeliest of results: Pat would manage to inspire a prominent lawyer with her most personal and unconventional novel, while Rice would manage to interest an author not known for magnanimity in some very serious philanthropy. By now, Pat didn’t want anyone she knew to profit from her death (this was, after all, the woman who had written to her mother’s lawyer to get herself disinherited), she was anxious not to pay trustee fees, and she wanted free advice from Donald Rice to help coordinate all the other free advice she was soliciting. But she was also, as always, having her own complicated kind of fun. And she was ill and knew it and really did need a place to put her money. And so the slowly growing idea of bestowing her worldly goods on the artists’ colony—that “supreme hospital,” as she’d once called it—where she had developed her first published novel, would come to seem both a pragmatic solution to her problems and the highest of the high ideals with which she began her life as a writer. Pat Highsmith never did anything for just one reason.

But first, Pat was ready to improve her current financial state by making use of Donald Rice as a sounding board for her intricate schemes. Rice thought that “with me, she was on a mission.” In fact, they were both on missions.

“She had the mind of a criminal genius…[S]he could perfectly legally have produced more money for herself but she indulged in these fantasies and these phone calls, which I would repeatedly receive after she’d talked to someone about this or about that, seeking my opinion about this or that or the other thing. This was something she immensely enjoyed, I think.”

Pat telephoned Don Rice “many many times” from what sounded to him like public telephone booths because “she suspected she was being wiretapped by people who were after her money.” And when Rice telephoned back she would tell him she’d have to call him again; she didn’t want anyone listening in. “It was all fantasy,” he says, “all part of her personality.”³⁴

Meanwhile, Mike Sundell, Yaddo’s current director, made his way in early June of 1993 from the Isola dei Pescatori in Italy by bus, boat, train, and taxi to Pat’s house in Tegna to take her to lunch. He found the Casa Highsmith a “terrifying house, it had a kind of majestic purity to it, grotesque, but still…” But Pat was “very welcoming,” the inside of the house was light and comfortable, and Sundell and Pat spent hours together drinking scotch and talking about Yaddo, about mutual friends like Buffie Johnson, about Pat’s work and its reception, and about the United States and Europe.³⁵ The subject of money was “off the table,” says Sundell, “though it was in my mind and may have been in hers.”³⁶ (It was.) Pat told Sundell “with a cackle” that the room she’d occupied at Yaddo was now known as “Sylvia Plath’s room.”

And she told him how, when she was working there on Strangers on a Train, “she’d be typing every night and there was a young woman near enough to hear the typewriter who was having writer’s block and said mournfully to Pat how could she go on and on typing like that. And Pat said she’d tried to explain that she was really just typing and revising to make the woman feel better…. Finally, Pat put her typewriter on a pillow so that it wouldn’t upset the woman in the next room.”³⁷

Five weeks after Mike Sundell’s visit, Pat went to see her local doctor, Dr. Del Notaro. She’d been dogged by a debilitating cold all that spring while finishing the troublesome first draft of Small g, she was having nosebleeds again, and she was tired; bone-tired, as it turned out. Tests showed that she was seriously anemic. The disease that had lurked in her blood since adolescence, focusing her attention on blood and breeding, was expressing itself with a vengeance. The doctor hustled her into the hospital within the hour and she was transfused. Her bone marrow was also suspected of being deficient, and tests showed that her blood lacked white platelets.³⁸ She was ordered to give up drinking, and she did so, cold turkey, for three weeks.

In the middle of September, she went to the hospital in Locarno, where a large, benign polyp was removed from her lower intestine, and then, on 10 October, she was sent to the Kantonspital in Basel for seven days, “a big modern place which has a division specializing in blood matters.” She had been losing weight alarmingly—“15 kilos”—during the last year, and at the Kantonspital she was treated with daily injections to counteract what her doctors thought she was suffering from: a deficiency of the special cells that encircle and neutralize bacteria in the body and a lack of thrombocytes. “Thrombocytes,” she wrote to Barbara Skelton with her usual clinical interest, “are the clotting factors in blood, and with insufficient, one becomes a bleeder or haemophiliac—that’s me…. I am said to be stable now. To me that means I may not die in the next months, which I certainly thought I would do last year and most of this year.”³⁹

Finally—Pat said it took months—a full diagnosis was made, and, metaphorically at least, the results would not have been a surprise to anyone who understood anything at all about the life and work of Patricia Highsmith. Pat was suffering from two malignant and contradictory diseases: treating one of them would mean hastening her death from the other one.

Pat had, first of all, aplastic anemia, which meant that her bone marrow had “gone to sleep” it wasn’t producing the “haemoglobin and thrombocytes” her blood needed to regenerate itself. (She continued to hope her bone marrow would “wake up” and “swing back into action.”)⁴⁰ Second, a lung and one of her adrenal glands were pocked and pitted with small, presumptively cancerous, tumors, too tiny to be surgically removed. And the modern poisons medical science was prescribing as treatment for the tumors—chemotherapy and radiation—couldn’t be used without further endangering her degraded bone marrow. It was the classic Highsmith theme made flesh: the Alter Ego, the Evil Twin, the inner civil war. “There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush,” Patricia had written in Strangers on a Train. Suddenly, something very like that ambush had just been sprung on its author.

Pat’s work and life had always been the product of an irreconcilably divided mind, and now her dying was to be the result of two incompatibly treatable diseases. It was a finish she could have written for herself, as grotesquely ironic as it was appallingly suitable.

While she was in Basel, Pat had been given a short, intensive course of drugs to prevent her body from attacking its own bone marrow and to stimulate the production of new blood cells. Then she was returned home to Tegna, where her kind neighbors alternated in driving her to Locarno for the transfusions her condition required, and a young nurse came to her house twice a week to test her blood. What she couldn’t bear was the wasting of her days, and she wrote to Bettina Berch that she felt leashed to the hospital “as if I were a dog” and that her illness had “cost me more time than I care to think about.” ⁴¹

By the spring of 1994, it was obvious that Pat shouldn’t continue living alone in the house; she needed regular chauffeuring to her blood treatments and some kind of surveillance at home. Naturally, she wasn’t willing to pay for it. Bruno Sager, who had been an orchestra and theater consultant in Zurich but was now between jobs and newly divorced, had a daughter who worked for Diogenes. And so it was through Diogenes that Sager was suggested as a possible companion for Patricia Highsmith as her health declined. Sager came to the Casa Highsmith at the end of May, successfully passed whatever laser, radar, and X-ray tests Pat applied to him—“when she knew I was sent by Diogenes and that I knew Daniel Keel, that was reference enough,” he says—and moved into one part of the pitchfork-shaped Casa Highsmith sometime between the seventh and the tenth of June 1994, while Pat went on occupying the other part: her part. Pat paid Sager 400 Swiss francs (less than $225) a month; but he didn’t come for the money. After six months with Pat, he left to join a monastery.

“No,” said Bruno Sager, smiling, “she didn’t drive me into the monastery.” He was already a religious man, thinking about joining a monastery before he met Pat; Pat knew this, and the Highsmith house was Sager’s preparation for spiritual seclusion. She told him that she wasn’t used to living with anyone, that it might be difficult. She had two or three phones in the house, but only one line: “she wouldn’t pay for another one.” The first night he was there, Pat cooked a “huge piece of roast beef” to “welcome” him, but she left it “two hours too long in the oven,” and then, he says, “for the next week, it was my duty to finish that roast beef.” After that, Sager, “a passionate cook,” did most of the cooking. And Pat ate a little.

Sager also did the shopping for the house as well, and Pat made him advance his own money for all the groceries, scrutinizing every bill carefully to make sure he’d bought the best bargains.

Their conversation was limited to small talk, to music—about which they could agree—and to family matters—his family matters, since Pat, as always, was fascinated by other people’s families. When his daughter and then his son came to dinner, Pat was “a perfect hostess.” She didn’t have many visitors: Ingeborg Moelich, a “sunny person,” came by often, the Hubers were intermittently next door, the Keels came a couple of times from Zurich, and Vivien De Bernardi was a very occasional visitor. Pat had no guests to stay overnight in the house during the time Sager was there, but she had frequent telephone conversations with Kingsley, whom she described as “my best friend.” Sager couldn’t discuss politics with Pat because “her politics were very extreme, based on certain prejudices, not on analysis.” He found that he couldn’t discuss religion either, but from their conversations, he concluded that Pat “was one of these persons searching for some kind of god or soul but she never could stand the cages of Catholicism or any of the other religions. She was not an atheist, not at all.” ⁴²

About all her editors, except for Daniel Keel, “she was vicious. ‘Oh, he’s a Jew, you know, he’s a Jew,’ she would say about them.” And she put up a huge fence to screen out her dog-owning Italian neighbors on the other side of her house.

Sometimes, Sager says, Pat would walk “around the house with a ferocious look on her face.” When he first came to Casa Highsmith, he thought she must always be angry, but later on, he thought simply: “If she’s not conscious, this is how her face looks.” But there were moments when her “young face came through, when her youth came through. Maybe when she was watching the videos of her novels. Then, like a flower, she could open.” ⁴³

They got on well, Sager says, and he “felt fond of her.”

“I didn’t want to be her servant…. I was living with her, I did more than I had to, but I was enjoying myself, I had my pleasures in doing a good job—and I did it for myself as well.” ⁴⁴

It was probably the best way to live with Pat.

When Sager arrived in June, “the garden was a terrible mess, it was never mowed, she wouldn’t employ a gardener—too expensive.” So on the Monday after he settled in, he started to do the gardening. It wasn’t part of his job description; he just did it. Eventually he was even able to persuade Pat to allow him to water the dead lawn, brown as a hall carpet by now because she hadn’t wanted to pay the water bill. But when she saw the lawn turn green under his care, she agreed to a little lawn care. She still loved the snails in her garden, allowing herself to be photographed with them for a magazine feature one day when Charlotte, the cat, who was supposed to be the companion animal in the article, intuited two hours before the photographers arrived that they were coming—and ran away for four days. And Pat liked the many little spiders crawling about in her house, always asking Sager to carry them outside, rather than kill them.

But she didn’t seem to care much for Charlotte, her unpedigreed, orange “barn cat” and last living animal companion. Charlotte continued to remind Pat of a “dog.”

“She wasn’t affectionate with the cat. But she wanted always to know where she was: ‘Did you feed the cat?’ She wasn’t very nice to Charlotte but the cat was still important to her. Like a family member, I imagine, with whom perhaps she didn’t get on very well, but she was still concerned with her welfare.” ⁴⁵

Sager gave Pat notice that he’d been accepted to a monastery about a month before he left. In the meantime, Anna Keel had found “a young Spanish girl of good family” (the parents were doctors; the girl was twenty) to go and stay with Pat after Sager had gone. It wasn’t a happy idea. The girl was in Pat’s house for two weeks, from about 6 December to just before Christmas. She told Anna Keel that she was too scared to leave her room—scared, perhaps, that Pat might have had designs on her. The girl left Pat’s house before Christmas “for vacation”—and she never came back.⁴⁶

When Bruno Sager had first arrived at Casa Highsmith, Pat didn’t tell him what was wrong with her. It seemed to him that she “didn’t look sick, she just looked very fragile” she was “a string bean.” By his last month in the house, November 1994, Pat was looking “extremely unwell.” ⁴⁷When he heard about her death, his first thought was that if he’d stayed a little longer, she might have lived a little longer. He came from his monastery in March to go to her memorial service.

Pat was weak, she was terribly tired, but still she travelled to Paris in November of 1994 for three days (the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth) for a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Le Nouvel Observateur (she had been one of the authors asked to describe an “ordinary day” in an April 1994 issue devoted to prominent people) and to do some prepublication interviews for Small g. She asked a part-time neighbor in Tegna, a wealthy, gay male from South Africa, Bee Loggenberg—a man she enjoyed, “flamboyant” and “funny,” says Sager—to accompany her as minder. But when Jean-Étienne Cohen-Séat of Calmann-Lévy invited her to come back to Paris in 1995 for the official publication of Small g, she wrote to him regretfully that she hesitated “to make plans” now because she “hadn’t the strength I had a year ago.” ⁴⁸ A year ago, she’d only thought she was dying.

Pat was put up in comfort at the Paris Ritz, in her favorite room at the back of the hotel. And it was there that her new editor at Calmann-Lévy, Patrice Hoffman, first met her. He was, he says, beyond excitement to be meeting this woman who “was a myth in the company.” By late 1993, Hoffman had received the final version of Small g, and he and François Rossot—“a great translator”—sat down to read it carefully.

I was so honored as a young editor to have this manuscript, but then when I saw it…To tell you the truth, we were rather disappointed by Small g. There was an ambiance bizarre like the ambiance in the best Highsmith books. In this she succeeded, but in nothing else…. I could sense a number of themes hiding behind this book [but] they just didn’t hang together…. [S]he kept her troubled characters, all this was interesting, but the dramaturgy was bad and the dialogue was worse. We worked for almost a year on the translation, François has a très belle plume, we tried to cut the redundancies and to raise the level of the dialogue. Much was trimmed, much was elevated, [François] did a parallel work…. Of course, I wondered if any other of her other [translated] books had been “improved.” ⁴⁹

But Small g, Hoffman felt, was an exception: “She had been sick for so long.”

When the novel was published in France the month after Pat’s death, it sold fifty thousand copies “because,” says Hoffman, “it was Highsmith, the myth. She had incredible reviews; there must have been fifty articles and none of them was negative…. She benefitted even from her death.”

The best part about the novel for Hoffman was that “it brought me the good fortune of meeting Highsmith before she died.” He was with Pat “two times at the Ritz bar and then…in discussion for an hour or an hour and a half.” And he was in her room for half an hour before the journalists came. Pat “was continually spitting into a handkerchief,” and he marvelled at her determination.

“Dying, she came for her publicity…. She seemed totally exhausted, but she had a way of looking that was very direct, a judging eye, an inquisitor. It was very impressive…. [S]he sized me up so acutely. She was a fascinating woman, like a snake fascinating her prey.”⁵⁰

It was Pat’s last public performance as a writer.

But on the inside back cover of the last notebook in which she made entries, Cahier 37, Pat left the ghost of a hint for a future performance she was thinking about. Still playing with oppositions, still imagining a life for the character who had meant so much to her since he’d walked into her imagination on a beach in Positano all those years ago, Pat wrote down two new titles for a novel about the talented Mr. Ripley. One of those titles was Ripley’s Luck. The other one was Ripley and the Voices of the Dead. It was the second title that Pat crossed out.