The Talented Miss Highsmith Read Online Free Page B

in the form of a list, Pat’s preferred method of organizing her life. The order of the list is simply the order in which the objects came before my eyes. Wherever necessary, I’ve added interpretative notes, but for the most part the list is descriptive: a catalogue raisonné of Patricia Highsmith’s hidden history of possessions.
    By now, you will be able to work out for yourself most of the meanings contained in her things.
    Objects
    A coffee-colored Olympia De Luxe portable typewriter, manufactured in 1956, with a standard QUERTYUIOP American keyboard, an easy action (I tried it, repeatedly), and an E key whose identifying letter has been worn away long ago by heavy use. Four little rubber feet. Its hardshell, whale gray case has the curves and swells of a Slipstream trailer and has travelled everywhere: it is covered with stickers from airlines and foreign countries. Two addresses are affixed: 77 Moncourt and Tegna. The name Patricia Highsmith is attached to both addresses. This is the typewriter Pat used for most of her work from 1956 onwards.
    A box of Caran d’Ache pencils.
    Assorted pens. An eraser.
    A Swiss Army knife. With attachments.
    A dagger.
    Some straight pins.
    Food tins and jam jars, rinsed and cleaned, for pencils and pens.
    A very sharp letter opener, bladed.
    A Wite-Out pencil.
    A recorder. (She used to play this, delicately wiping off the mouthpiece when she handed it to guests to try, and wiping the mouthpiece again when she took it back.)
    The prescription for her regular glasses: +3 (right eye), +2½ (left eye).
    A pair of reading glasses: yellow with black tops or “eyebrows.” Quite dandyish.
    A medallion from the French government: Ordre des arts et des lettres.
    The 1964 Critics Award from the Crimewriters’ Association.
    Another recorder.
    Trivets of straw that hold little seashells.
    A wooden head, whose face is frozen in an expression of horror and sorrow. Approximately ten inches high with a wooden base. It seems to be the head of a male, but it looks uncannily like the long-faced portrait Allela Cornell painted of the twenty-three-year-old Pat Highsmith. Pat gave this little wood sculpture to Rosalind Constable, and Rosalind, at the end of her life, sent it back to Pat so that, as Rosalind wrote in her letter, prospective biographers “can see what you do with your left hand.”
    Little decorated boxes.
    A paperweight: the small, very heavy head of a longhorn cow skull, cast in bronze by her second cousin, Dan Walton Coates, a western artist of note, in his spare time, in 1991.
    A papier-mâché cat’s-head box (the head lifts off) which holds Swiss coins. Inscribed: “The Cat Who Followed Pat by J & L.” Given by Linda and her friend Joëlle, the same set of friends who gave Pat a fancy address book and painted her kitchen in Moncourt.
    Two large, old, heavy house keys from her Aurigeno house, marked “Ornamental, lock now changed. Main Back Door.”
    Many odd little animal totems.
    A goat’s bell .
    A very large pair of binoculars.
    A large gilt-edged mirror, with photos and postcards Scotch-taped to the sides of the glass; amongst them, a postcard of Colette in drag, a postcard of a panel from the Bayeux Unicorn Tapestry, and a photo of Bettina Berch with her newborn daughter.
    A double magnifying glass.
    A cheap pencil sharpener.
    Another knife.
    Two long, very heavy swords. These are the “Confederate swords” Pat said she bought in Texas during the year she was left with her grandmother in Fort Worth while Mary went back with Stanley to New York. She kept them in the crossed, dueling position on the walls of each of her houses. As Mary Highsmith was dying—and without mentioning Mary’s death as a motive—Pat finally uncrossed them. The swords were forged in Massachusetts: one in Chicopee and the other in Springfield.
    A lethal-looking carving knife and fork set, large enough to dismember a