The Talented Miss Highsmith (91 page)

“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.”
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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.
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The subject of money was “off the table,” says Sundell, “though it was in my mind and may have been in hers.”
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(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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”)
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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When 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.”
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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.