Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“Oh, just keep ‘em.”

“Don’t you make scrapbooks?”

“Nope.” She was looking at him, and Bruno wanted her to look at the clippings.

“Oh, you’re just a ba-aby,” She pinched his cheek. “Hardly a bit of fuzz on your chin yet! I don’t know why your mother’s worried about you—”

“She’s not worried.”

“—when you just need time to grow up. Come on down to breakfast with me. Yes, pajamas and all.”

Bruno gave her his arm on the stairs.

“I’ve got the least bit of shopping to do,” said his grandmother as she poured his coffee, “and then I thought we’d do something nice. Maybe a good movie—with a murder in it—or maybe the amusement park. I haven’t been to an amusement park in a-ages,”

Bruno’s eyes opened as wide as they could.

“Which would you like? Well, we can look over the movies when we get there.”

“I’d like the amusement park, Grannie.”

Bruno enjoyed the day, helping her in and out of the car, piloting her around the amusement park, though there was not much after all his grandmother could do or eat. But they rode the ferris wheel together. Bruno told his grandmother about the big ferris wheel in Metcalf, but she did not ask him when he had been there.

Sammie Franklin was still at the house when they came home, staying for dinner. Bruno’s eyebrows drew together at the first sight of him. He knew his grandmother cared as little for Sammie as he did, and Bruno felt suddenly a great tenderness for her, because she accepted Sammie so uncomplainingly, accepted any mongrel his mother brought on the place. What had he and his mother been doing all day? They had been to a movie, they said, one of Sammies movies. And there was a letter for him upstairs in his room.

Bruno ran upstairs. The letter was from Florida. He tore it open with his hands shaking like ten hangovers. He had never wanted a letter so badly, not even at camp, when he had waited for letters from his mother.

Sept. 6

Dear Charles,

I do not understand your message to me, or for that matter your great interest in me. I know you very slightly, but enough to assure me that we have nothing in common on which to base a friendship. May I ask you please not to telephone my mother again or communicate with me?

Thank you for trying to return the book to me. Its loss is of no importance.

Guy Haines

Bruno brought it up closer and read it again, his eyes lingering incredulously on a word here and there. His pointed tongue stretched over his upper lip, then disappeared suddenly. He felt shorn. It was a feeling like grief, or like a death. Worse! He glanced about his room, hating the furniture, hating his possessions. Then the pain centered in his chest, and reflexively he began to cry.

After dinner, Sammie Franklin and he got into an argument about vermouths. Sammie said the drier the vermouth, the more one had to put into a martini, though he admitted he was not a martini drinker. Bruno said he was not a martini drinker either, but he knew better than that. The argument went on even after his grandmother said good night and left them. They were on the upstairs terrace in the dark, his mother in the glider and he and Sammie standing by the parapet. Bruno ran down to the bar for the ingredients to prove his point. They both made martinis and tasted them, and though it was clear Bruno was right, Sammie kept holding out, and chuckling as if he didn’t quite mean what he said either, which Bruno found insufferable.

“Go to New York and learn something! “Bruno shouted. His mother had just left the terrace.

“How do you know what you’re saying anyway?” Sammie retorted. The moonlight made his fat grinning face blue-green and yellow, like gorgonzola cheese. “You’re pickled all day. You—”

Bruno caught Sammie by the shirtfront and bent him backward over the parapet. Sammies feet rattled on the tiles. His shirt split. When he wriggled sideways to safety, the blue had left his face and it was a shadowless yellow-white.

“Th-the hell’s the matter with you?” he bellowed. “You’d a shoved me over, wouldn’t you?”

“No, I wouldn’t!” Bruno shrieked, louder than Sammie. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe, like in the mornings. He took his stiff, sweaty hands down from his face. He had done a murder, hadn’t he? Why should he do another? But he had seen Sammie squirming on the points of the iron fence right below, and he had wanted him there. He heard Sammie stirring a highball fast. Bruno stumbled over the threshold of the French window into the house.

“And stay out!” Sammie shouted after him.

The shaking passion in Sammies voice sent a throb of fear through him. Bruno said nothing as he passed his mother in the hall. Going downstairs, he clung to the banister with both hands, cursing the ringing, aching, unmanageable mess in his head, cursing the martinis he had drunk with Sammie. He staggered into the living room.

“Charley, what did you do to Sammie?” His mother had followed him in.

“Ah, wha’d I do to Sammie!” Bruno shoved his hand toward her blurred figure and sat down on the sofa with a bounce.

“Charley—come back and apologize.” The white blur of her evening dress came closer, one brown arm extended toward him.

“Are you sleeping with that guy? Are you sleeping with that guy?” He knew he had only to lie back on the sofa and he would pass out like a light, so he lay back, and never felt her arm at all.

Eighteen

In the month after Guy returned to New York, his restlessness, his dissatisfaction with himself, with his work, with Anne, had focused gradually on Bruno. It was Bruno who made him hate to look at pictures of the Palmyra now, Bruno who was the real cause of his anxiety that he had blamed on the dearth of commissions since he had come back from Palm Beach. Bruno who had made him argue so senselessly with Anne the other evening about not getting a better office, not buying new furniture and a rug for this one. Bruno who had made him tell Anne he did not consider himself a success, that the Palmyra meant nothing. Bruno who had made Anne turn quietly away from him that evening and walk out the door, who had made him wait until he heard the elevator door close, before he ran down the eight flights of stairs and begged her to forgive him.

And who knew? Perhaps it was Bruno who kept him from getting jobs now. The creation of a building was a spiritual act. So long as he harbored his knowledge of Bruno’s guilt, he corrupted himself in a sense. Such a thing could be perceived in him, he felt. Consciously, he had made up his mind to let the police trap Bruno. But as the weeks went by and they didn’t, he was plagued by a feeling that he should act himself. What stopped him was both an aversion to accusing a man of murder and a senseless but lingering doubt that Bruno might not be guilty. That Bruno had committed the crime struck him at times as so fantastic, all his previous conviction was momentarily wiped out. At times, he felt he would have doubted even if Bruno had sent him a written confession. And yet, he had to admit to himself that he was sure Bruno had done it. The weeks that went by without the police picking up any strong trail seemed to confirm it. As Bruno had said, how could they with no motivation? His letter to Bruno in September had silenced him all the fall, but just before he left Florida, a sober note from Bruno had said he would be back in New York in December and he hoped to be able to have a talk with him. Guy was determined to have nothing to do with him.

Still he fretted, about everything and about nothing, but chiefly about his work. Anne told him to be patient. Anne reminded him that he had already proven himself in Florida. In greater measure than ever before, she offered him the tenderness and reassurance he needed so, yet he found that in his lowest, most stubborn moments he could not always accept it.