The Black House by Patricia Highsmith

Author:Patricia Highsmith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Old Folks

at Home

“Well,” Lois said finally, “let’s do it.” Her expression as she looked at her husband was serious, a little worried, but she spoke with conviction.

“Okay,” said Herbert, tensely.

They were going to adopt an elderly couple to live with them. More than elderly, old probably. It was not a hasty decision on the part of the McIntyres. They had been thinking about it for several weeks. They had no children themselves, and didn’t want any. Herbert was a strategy analyst at a government-sponsored institution called Bayswater, some four miles from where they lived, and Lois was an historian, specializing in European history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thirty-three years old now, she had three books and a score of articles to her credit. She and Herbert could afford a pleasant two-story house in Connecticut with a glass-enclosed sunroom that was Herbert’s workroom and also their main library, handsome grounds and a part-time gardener all year round to look after their lawn and trees, bushes and flowers. They knew people in the neighborhood, friends and acquaintances, who had children—young children and teenagers—and the McIntyres felt a little guilty about not fulfilling their duty in this department; and besides that, they had seen an old people’s nursing home at first hand a few months ago, when Eustace Vickers, a retired inventor attached to Bayswater, had passed away. The McIntyres, along with a few of Herbert’s colleagues, had paid a visit every few days to Eustace, who had been popular and active until his stroke.

One of the nurses at the home had told Lois and Herbert that lots of families in the region took in old people for a week at a time, especially in winter or at the Christmas season, to give them a change, “a taste of family life for a few days,” and they came back much cheered and improved. “Some people are kind enough to adopt an old person—even a couple—to live with them in their homes,” the nurse had said.

Lois remembered her shudder at the thought, then, with a twinge of guilt. Old people didn’t live forever. She and Herbert might be in the same boat one day, objects of semi-charity, really, dependent on the whim of nurses for basic physical needs. And old people loved to be helpful around the house, if they possibly could be, the nurse had said.

“We’ll have to go—and look,” Herbert said to Lois, then broke out in a grin suddenly. “Something like shopping for an orphan child, eh?”

Lois laughed too. To laugh was a relief after the earnest conversation of the past minutes. “Are you joking? Orphanages give people the children the orphanages choose to give. What kind of a child do you think we’d rate, Herb? White? High I.Q.? Good health? I doubt it.”

“I doubt it too. We don’t go to church.”

“And we don’t vote, because we don’t know which party to vote for.”

“That’s because you’re an historian. And I’m a policy analyzer. Oh yes, and I don’t sleep at regular hours and sometimes switch on foreign news at four in the morning.

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