Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“I wish you had let me pay the check.”

“A-aw, no!” Bruno protested.” I just mean it’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it, when your own father robs you. It isn’t even his money, it’s my mother’s family’s money.” He waited for Guy to comment.

“Hasn’t your mother any say about it?”

“My father got his name put on it when I was a kid!” Bruno shouted hoarsely.

“Oh.” Guy wondered how many people Bruno had met, bought dinners for, and told the same story about his father. “Why did he do that?”

Bruno brought his hands up in a hopeless shrug, then hid them fast in his pockets.” I said he was a bastard, didn’t I? He robs everyone he can. Now he says he won’t give it to me because I won’t work, but that’s a lie. He thinks my mother and I have too good a time as it is. He’s always scheming up ways to cut in.”

Guy could see him and his mother, a youngish Long Island society woman who used too much mascara and occasionally, like her son, enjoyed tough company. “Where’d you go to college?”

“Harvard. Busted out sophomore year. Drinking and gambling.” He shrugged with a writhing movement of his narrow shoulders. “Not like you, huh? Okay, I’m a bum, so what?” He poured more Scotch for both of them.

“Who said you were?”

“My father says so. He should’ve had a nice quiet son like you, then everybody would’ve been happy.”

“What makes you think I’m nice and quiet?”

“I mean you’re serious and you choose a profession. Like architecture. Me, I don’t feel like working. I don’t have to work, see? I’m not a writer or a painter or a musician. Is there any reason a person should work if they don’t have to? I’ll get my ulcers the easy way. My father has ulcers. Hah! He still has hopes I’ll enter his hardware business. I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication. Am I right?”

Guy looked at him wryly and sprinkled salt on the French fried potato on his fork. He was eating slowly, enjoying his meal, even vaguely enjoying Bruno, as he might have enjoyed an entertainment on a distant stage. Actually, he was thinking of Anne. Sometimes the faint continuous dream he had of her seemed more real than the outside world that penetrated only in sharp fragments, occasional images, like the scratch on the Rolleiflex case, the long cigarette Bruno had plunged into his pat of butter, the shattered glass of the photograph of the father Bruno had thrown out in the hall in the story he was telling now. It had just occurred to Guy he might have time to see Anne in Mexico, between seeing Miriam and going to Florida. If he got through with Miriam quickly, he could fly to Mexico and fly to Palm Beach. It hadn’t occurred to him before because he couldn’t afford it. But if the Palm Beach contract came through, he could.

“Can you imagine anything more insulting? Locking the garage where my own car is?” Bruno’s voice had cracked and was stuck at a shrieking pitch.

“Why?” Guy asked.

“Just because he knew I needed it bad that night! My friends picked me up finally, so what does he get out of it?”

Guy didn’t know what to say. “He keeps the keys?”

“He took my keysl Took them out of my room! That’s why he was scared of me. He left the house that night, he was so scared.”

Bruno was turned in his chair, breathing hard, chewing a fingernail. Some wisps of hair, darkened brown with sweat, bobbed like antennae over his forehead. “My mother wasn’t home, or it never could have happened, of course.”

“Of course,” Guy echoed involuntarily. Their whole conversation had been leading to this story, he supposed, that he had heard only half of. Back of the bloodshot eyes that had opened on him in the Pullman car, back of the wistful smile, another story of hatred and injustice. “So you threw his picture out in the hall?” Guy asked meaninglessly.

“I threw it out of my mother’s room,” Bruno said, emphasizing the last three words. “My father put it in my mother’s room. She doesn’t like the Captain any better than I do. The Captain!—I don’t call him anything, brother!”

“But what’s he got against you?”

“Against me and my mother, too! He’s different from us or any other human.” He doesn’t like anybody. He doesn’t like anything but money. He cut enough throats to make a lot of money, that’s all. Sure he’s smart! Okay! But his conscience is sure eating him now! That’s why he wants me to go into his business, so I’ll cut throats and feel as lousy as he does!” Bruno’s stiff hand closed, then his mouth, then his eyes.

Guy thought he was about to cry, when the puffy lids lifted and the smile staggered back.

“Boring, huh? I was just explaining why I left town so soon, ahead of my mother. You don’t know what a cheerful guy I am really! Honest!”

“Can’t you leave home if you want to?”

Bruno didn’t seem to understand his question at first, then he answered calmly, “Sure, only I like to be with my mother.”

And his mother stayed because of the money, Guy supposed. “Cigarette?”

Bruno took one, smiling. “You know, the night he left the house was the first time in maybe ten years he’d gone out. I wonder where the hell he even went. I was sore enough that night to kill him and he knew it. Ever feel like murdering somebody?”

“No.”

“I do. I’m sure sometimes I could kill my father.” He looked down at his plate with a bemused smile. “You know what my father does for a hobby? Guess.”

Guy didn’t want to guess. He felt suddenly bored and wanted to be alone.

“He collects cookie cutters!“Bruno exploded with a snickering laugh. “Cookie cutters, honest! He’s got all kinds—Pennsylvania Dutch, Bavarian, English, French, a lot of Hungarian, all around the room. Animal-cracker cookie cutters framed over his desk—you know, the things kids eat in boxes? He wrote the president of the company and they sent him a whole set. The machine age!” Bruno laughed and ducked his head.

Guy stared at him. Bruno himself was funnier than what he said. “Does he ever use them?”

“Huh?”

“Does he ever make cookies?”

Bruno whooped. With a wriggle, he removed his jacket and flung it at a suitcase. For a moment he seemed too excited to say anything, then remarked with sudden quiet, “My mother’s always telling him to go back to his cookie cutters.” A film of sweat covered his smooth face like thin oil. He thrust his smile solicitously half across the table. “Enjoy your dinner?”

“Very much,” Guy said heartily.

“Ever hear of the Bruno Transforming Company of Long Island? Makes AC-DC gadgets?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, why should you? Makes plenty of dough though. You interested in making money?”

“Not awfully.”

“Mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Yeah? I would’ve said older. How old you think I look?”

Guy studied him politely. “Maybe twentyfour or five,” he answered, intending to flatter him, for he looked younger.

“Yeah, I am. Twentyfive. You mean I do look twentyfive with this—this thing right in the center of my head?” Bruno caught his underlip between his teeth. A glint of wariness came in his eyes, and suddenly he cupped his hand over his forehead in intense and bitter shame. He sprang up and went to the mirror. “I meant to put something over it.”

Guy said something reassuring, but Bruno kept looking at himself this way and that in the mirror, in an agony of self-torture. “It couldn’t be a pimple,” he said nasally. “It’s a boil. It’s everything I hate boiling up in me. It’s a plague of Job!”

“Oh, now!” Guy laughed.