Wicked Spirits, page 21
While writing was her first love, Highsmith shared her parents’ artistry. In the late 1950s, she provided comic illustrations for Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (1958), a children’s book by her friend Doris Sanders. The following year, she took part in an exhibition to raise funds for Rockland County Center for Mental Health in Orangetown, New York. As well watercolours of Trieste and San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, her contribution to the exhibition also included humorous and mildly unsettling pen-and-ink sketches such as ‘Pumpkin and Toothbrush’, which pictured a disintegrating jack o’lantern, and ‘Cat and Fish’, which one reviewer described as ‘repellent’.
Around the beginning of the 1960s, Highsmith abandoned America for Europe, living in Positano in Italy, and also at Bridge Cottage in the village of Earl Soham in Suffolk, England. In 1967, she moved to Fontainebleau in France, and later to Switzerland. While continuing to write novels, many of which were filmed in English or French, she also completed Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966), even though Highsmith was not entirely comfortable with the notion that she was a writer of such fiction.
Throughout her life Patricia Highsmith drank and smoke heavily and, on 4 February 1995 she died from leukaemia at La Carità Hospital in Locarno, Switzerland. She left her estate to Yaddo, the retreat where she had completed Strangers on a Train nearly fifty years earlier. There are several biographies, including Andrew Wilson’s Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) and The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (2009).
One of only a handful of uncollected stories, ‘We Are Sorry Too’ was first published in the Winter 1942 issue of The Barnard Quarterly. I am grateful to Martha Tenney, Director of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections at the Barnard Library, for drawing it to my attention.
VEX NOT HIS GHOST
John Dickson Carr
NARRATOR: Appointment with Fear!
(Theme)
This is your storyteller, the Man in Black, here again to bring you another tale in our fireside series, Appointment with Fear. Tonight, good friends, I find myself in a somewhat grim mood; and I have chosen a dark and lonely background—both of the place and of the soul. Is innocence always vindicated, as out comfortable theory is? Men’s lives have been saved at what some call the last moment. But can a man’s life be saved even after he has been strapped into the electric chair? And so, while we watch the last frantic moments of a murderer, we trust we shall keep our promise to bring you … an Appointment with Fear.
(Music up. Narrator speaks through)
New York, nineteen thirty-five.
(Fantastic music through next voices, which are those of men; newspaper-sellers, and a suggestion of street noises)
FIRST VOICE: Extra! Read all about it! Harry North dies tonight!
SECOND VOICE: Appeal denied! Dockside killer faces chair!
FIRST VOICE: Extra! Read all about it! Harry North dies tonight!
THIRD VOICE: (woman, as though reading) ‘New York, August tenth. Still declaring his innocence, Harry North, aged twenty-eight, former schoolmaster who was sentenced to death a year ago for the murder of Alvin Conyers, heard this morning that Governor Lehmann had declined to intervene.’
FOURTH VOICE: (woman) A year ago! Lord pity him!
FIFTH VOICE: (man) He did the guy in, didn’t he?
THIRD VOICE: ‘Long and bitter has been North’s fight to save himself from the last mile at Sing Sing and the ministrations of the famous executioner, Riley. North, now little more than a walking skeleton, told me today: “I’m innocent. I swear to God I’m innocent. But I think I’m glad it’s all over.”’
(Music up and down, then backing narrator)
NARRATOR: And so, on that close August night with heatlightning flickering in the sky, there is tension in the little town of Ossining, some thirty-odd miles out along the banks the Hudson. Here is Sing Sing Prison, city of the lost. But no one inside those walls does the chill of death strike more closely than to a certain girl now driving a motor-car—driving recklessly, almost blindly—along the dim-lit main road which leads from New York to Ossining …
(The music comes out on ‘motor-car’, and is picked up by car-noise continuing underneath. Dorothy Lake is in her late twenties, of a pleasant voice, but now in a condition bordering on hysteria)
DOROTHY: (muttering, to herself) A quarter to ten … that’s an hour and fifteen minutes. A quarter fifteen minutes. (slight pause; bursting out) I can’t do it, Harry! I can’t watch them burn you to death! I … I … (sharply) LOOK OUT!
(There is a grind as of brakes applied, and a crunch of wheels skidding to an abrupt stop. A man’s voice speaks from a distance. Though a rather strong voice, it is mild, middle-aged, and almost humble, with a quick pleading intonation and a very faintly Irish accent. The man seems not ill-educated, and anxious to please)
MAN: (off) Just a minute, miss! Please!
DOROTHY: (calling) What on earth do you mean, jumping in front of the car?
MAN: I’m sorry, miss! I didn’t mean any harm. But I had to stop you!
DOROTHY: If you’re a hold-up man …
MAN: I’m not a hold-up man! Honestly I’m not! May I—come closer?
DOROTHY: I suppose so. But …
MAN: (approaching, humbly eager) That’s my car over at the side of the road, miss. I ran out of gas. But I’ve got to get to Ossining. I’ve just got to get to Ossining!
DOROTHY: (sharply) What’s that you’ve got in your hand?
MAN: Only a bird-cage, miss.
DOROTHY: A bird-cage?
MAN: It’s a canary, miss. Billy, his name is, after a cousin of mine. He had distemper, and I took him to Redfern’s on Forty-Seventh Street. But he’s a fine little singer, when I take the cover off the cage. See?
(The canary sings)
(apologetically) I’m a lonely man, miss; and he’s company for me.
(Dorothy suddenly sobs)
(quickly) Wait a minute, miss! You’re crying! What’s wrong?
DOROTHY: (fiercely) I am not crying!
MAN: Sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to upset you.
DOROTHY: But I am going to Ossining, and I’m in a hurry. If you’re going to get in, then please get in!
(Car door opens and closes. Car starts up. Man speaks after its hum settles steadily)
MAN: We’re very grateful, Billy and me.
DOROTHY: That’s all right.
MAN: May I ask what part of Ossining you’re going to, miss?
DOROTHY: I’m going to the prison.
MAN: (amazed) To Sing Sing prison, miss? A nice young lady like you?
DOROTHY: (through her teeth) I’m not a ‘nice young lady’. I’m a newspaper reporter.
MAN: A newspaper reporter?
DOROTHY: Dorothy Lake of the Morning Record. I used to know Harry North. We went to the same college in the old days. So the city editor thought it would be a good humaninterest story … human-interest story! … If I covered the execution. If I had the last interview with Harry before they … (stops)
(The man’s voice perceptibly hardens)
MAN: I wouldn’t waste any sympathy on that fellow. miss.
DOROTHY: Why not?
MAN: He’s as guilty as hell.
DOROTHY: That’s not true!
MAN: (fiercely pleading) Listen to me, miss! Please listen!
DOROTHY: (quickly) Have you been drinking?
MAN: (humbly) Only a little bit, miss. It’s my nerves. And—I haven’t been well. I’m not drunk, or anything like that.
DOROTHY: Never mind. It’s all right.
MAN: Excuse me if I mop my forehead. It’s—my nerves.
DOROTHY: (on edge) It’s all right, I tell you!
MAN: This fellow North … I read all about it in the papers … held up an old man in a car, and battered his head in, and robbed him and then drove the car off the edge of the dock into the East River.
DOROTHY: It wasn’t Harry! It was somebody else!
MAN: That’s what they proved, miss—Have you got to accept this assignment?
DOROTHY: When I was eighteen years old, I thought I was in love with Harry North.
MAN: Then—?
DOROTHY: He was the great man of the senior class, and I was the little worshipper. I want to see him! I’ve got to see him!
MAN: See him if you like, miss. But—don’t go to the other thing!
DOROTHY: Why not?
MAN: Have you ever seen an electrocution?
DOROTHY: No!
MAN: It’s that hum, growing louder and louder, when the dynamos start. It’s the way their bodies jerk against the straps. It’s the smoke that comes up from them—a little bit of singeing—where the electrodes meet the flesh …
DOROTHY: (hysterically) For God’s sake, stop!
MAN: (changing tone) I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to upset you.
DOROTHY: You seem to know a whole lot about this.
MAN: I do, miss. I’m the executioner.
(Long pause. The canary sings above the sound of the motor-car)
DOROTHY: (dazed) You’re … what did you say?
MAN: (bitterly) I’m the executioner, miss. The man they call ‘Butcher’ Riley.
(The car stops abruptly)
DOROTHY: (in a strangled voice) Get out of here!
MAN/RILEY: I beg pardon, miss?
DOROTHY: Get out of this car!
RILEY: (pleading) Oh, please, miss! I’ve got to be at the prison by ten o’clock!
DOROTHY: Get out of this car!
RILEY: The execution is scheduled for eleven. If it doesn’t take place at eleven, the state law rules that the man’s legally dead and there’s nothing they can do to him.
DOROTHY: (struck by a thought) Do you mean …?
RILEY: (softly sinister now) But if you’re thinking of stranding me out here, and making me late for my duty, I’d better tell you it won’t work.
DOROTHY: Why not?
RILEY: They’d get somebody else to do it. Any electrician can throw a switch. And you’d only make me lose my fee for the job.
DOROTHY: (with loathing) Your fee!!
RILEY: I’ve got to live! The same as anybody else; (bitterly) You’re just like all the rest of them, aren’t you?
DOROTHY: How?
RILEY: They think I’m a good man, a decent man, until they her ‘Butcher Riley’. Them I’m a leper, and they’d be contaminated if they touched me. But why?
DOROTHY: Do you expect me to pity you?
RILEY: Am I any worse than the jury that condemns a man, or the judge that passes sentence?
DOROTHY: I don’t know.
RILEY: The state makes you callous; and what does it pay for that? It takes away your friends; and what does it pay for that? It makes you the loneliest man on God’s earth; and what does it pay for that? Less than enough to live on! (humbly again) Drive me to the prison, miss. Please drive me to the prison!
DOROTHY: (slowly) All right, Butcher Riley. I’ll take you to the prison. But …
RILEY: But what?
DOROTHY: How many executions have you handled, Butcher Riley?
RILEY: I don’t know, miss. Must be over a hundred, by this time.
DOROTHY: (very sharply) Then why are you taking this one so badly?
RILEY: (just as sharply) I’m not taking it badly! Who says I am?
DOROTHY: I do. The perspiration’s running down your face, and you’ve started to reach twice for that bottle in your side pocket.
RILEY: It’s my nerves, miss. I’m not well.
DOROTHY: Or do you think Harry North is innocent?
RILEY: It wouldn’t make any difference what I thought, miss. I’d have to throw that switch just the same. But he’s not innocent, miss; don’t waste any sympathy on him. (passionately) He’s as guilty as hell!
(Music up and down sharply. Narrator speaks through)
NARRATOR: Condemned Row, Sing Sing Prison.
(The music fades, and is replaced by the ticking of a clock which backs the Narrator’s speech)
Less than an hour, now, before the current is turned on. Condemned Row is a narrow stone corridor, dimly lighted by green-shaded electric lamps, with a line of heavily barred cells—like open cages—along one side. Several of the cells are occupied. And the beasts in these cages are restless tonight: more restless with every tick of the clock. The heat of the August night, the antiseptic smell of the corridor, all have sharpened nerves to a breaking point, when a uniformed guard approaches with a certain girl …
(The guard has a heavy middle-aged voice. Both he and Dorothy speak in low tones)
GUARD: (warningly kind) Don’t look at ’em as you go by, miss. They don’t like it, much, if you look at ’em.
DOROTHY: Which cell is …?
GUARD: Harry’s? Last one down. The one with the very bright light over it.
DOROTHY: That’s in case he tries to …?
GUARD: Yeah. We got to keep an eye on ’em.
DOROTHY: How long can I have?
GUARD: Ten minutes, Miss Lake.
DOROTHY: (blurting it, in a normally loud voice) Ten minutes? Only ten minutes until …?
GUARD: Sh-h-h!
DOROTHY: (muttering) Only ten minutes until the executioner comes.
GUARD: Riley don’t go into the cell, Miss Lake. Only the warden and the chaplain and the guards who … (embarrassed) … You know … shave his head, and the rest of it.
(As he speaks, an accordion begins playing very slowly and softly in the background. The tune is ‘Swanee River’. It continues under)
DOROTHY: (nervously) What’s that?
GUARD: The accordion, you mean?
DOROTHY: Yes!
GUARD: That’s Jake Diefer. The one who killed his girl. He’s due for it Monday night. (calling) Hey, Jake! Jake! (calling) Cut it out for a minute, will you, Jake! (The music stops) That’s a good guy! (in a low voice) That’s Harry’s cell, miss.
DOROTHY: (bewildered) Where?
GUARD: You can see him through the bars. Sitting on the bunk, with his hands over his eyes.
DOROTHY: That’s not Harry North!
GUARD: (embarrassed) His hair’s kinda grey, miss. I expect you don’t remember him like that.
DOROTHY: (frozen) No. No, I don’t.
GUARD: (raising his voice, with artificial heartiness) Look, Harry! Come on, old man; snap out of it! I’ve brought a friend of yours to see you. (breezily) I don’t have to tell you who she is …
(As he speaks, there is a noise of unlocking, and a rattle as of a heavy barred door being rolled sideways)
… because you know already. Go on in, Miss Lake. I’ll have to lock the door after you; but you won’t mind that. Ten minutes, and I won’t waste any more of ’em.
(Door rolls shut; lock turns. Slight pause)
DOROTHY: Hello, Harry.
(Harry North is. in his late twenties. His voice is slow-speaking and educated: strong, but a little hesitant and very tired)
HARRY: Hello, Dolly.
DOROTHY: Don’t get up. Please!
HARRY: I—I didn’t answer your letters, Dolly. I thought it was better not to.
DOROTHY: That’s all right. I only wanted you to know I was thinking about you.
HARRY: Will you sit down?
DOROTHY: Thanks.
(There is a heavy air of constraint on both)
HARRY: (slowly) I didn’t do it, you know. I didn’t kill that man Conyers.
DOROTHY: You don’t need to tell me, Harry.
HARRY: (unheeding) I’ve said that so often I wake up from sleep saying it. Always, when I dream, I’m in the courtroom. And they take me straight from the courtroom to the electric chair. That’s where I wake up.
DOROTHY: Please, Harry!
HARRY: I wasn’t trying to kill Conyers. I was trying to save him. But nobody believed that.
DOROTHY: Except—your friends.
HARRY: (intently) I saw the murderer, Dolly. He was on the running-board of the car after he’d beaten in Conyer’s head. He started the car for the edge of the dock, and then jumped off. I thought I could stop the car and save Conyers. I jumped on the running-board, and that was where the policeman saw me. But I saw the real murderer’s face. I saw it under a street-lamp, as plainly as I see yours. Nobody believed that, either.
DOROTHY: Does it do any good, Harry, to go round and round in the same old circle?
HARRY: No. I suppose not. (blankly) ‘Conyers is dead; vex not his ghost.’
DOROTHY: Please!
HARRY: (rousing himself) And I’m forgetting you, Dolly. Can I get you anything? A cigarette?
DOROTHY: (through her teeth) If you want to break me in little pieces, Harry, just go on being polite!
HARRY: I’m sorry.
DOROTHY: You were always like that.
HARRY: Was I?
DOROTHY: Yes. (groping) Can’t we talk about—other things?
HARRY: (half-smiling) The old days?
DOROTHY: Yes! The old days!
HARRY: Have you forgotten?
DOROTHY: Not a day! Not an hour! Not a minute!
HARRY: Two Yankees—
DOROTHY: (half laughing) They called us ‘damn Yankees’.
HARRY: —at a college in the Deep South.
DOROTHY: I loved it, Harry.
HARRY: We were going to do great things. Remember?
(Accordion-music fades in very softly under. The tune is ‘My Old Kentucky Home’)
DOROTHY: I remember how the hill looked at dusk. And the fireflies under the trees—
HARRY: And the scent of magnolia-blossom—
DOROTHY: And the river as warm as water out of a tap—
HARRY: And the white pillars of East Hall—
