Eleven by Patricia Highsmith

Author:Patricia Highsmith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802145307
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1980-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

MRS. AFTON, AMONG THY GREEN BRAES

For Dr. Felix Bauer, staring out the window of his groundfloor office on Lexington Avenue, the afternoon was a sluggish stream that had lost its current, or which might have been flowing either backwards or forwards. Traffic had thickened, but in the molten sunlight cars only inched behind red lights, their chromium twinkling as if with white heat. Dr. Bauer’s office was air-conditioned, actually pleasantly cool, but something, his logic or his blood, told him it was hot and it depressed him.

He glanced at his wristwatch. Miss Vavrica, who was scheduled for three-thirty, was once more funking her appointment. He could see her now, wide-eyed in a movie theater probably, hypnotizing herself so as not to think of what she should be doing. There were things he could be doing in the empty minutes before his four-fifteen patient, but he kept staring out the window. What was it about New York, he wondered, for all its speed and ambition, that deprived him of his initiative? He worked hard, he always had, but in America it was with a consciousness of working hard. It was not like Vienna or Paris, where he had worked and lived, relaxed with his wife and friends in the evenings, then found energy for more work, more reading, until the small hours of the morning.

The image of Mrs. Afton, small, rather stout but still pretty with a rare, radiant prettiness of middle age—scented, he remembered, with a gardenia cologne—superimposed itself upon the European evenings. Mrs. Afton was a very pleasant woman from the American south. She bore out what he had often heard about the American south, that it preserved a tradition of living in which there was time for meals and visits and conversation and, simply, for doing nothing. He had detected it in a few of Mrs. Afton’s phrases that might not have been necessary but were gratifying to hear, in her quiet good manners—and good manners usually annoyed him—which anxiety had not caused her to forget for an instant. Mrs. Afton reflected a way of life which, like an alchemy, made the world into quite another and more beautiful one when he was in her presence. He did not often find such pleasant people among his patients, but then Mrs. Afton had come to him last Monday in regard to her husband, not herself.

His four-fifteen patient, earnest Mr. Schriever, who earned every penny of the money he paid for his forty-five minute sessions and was aware of it every second, came and went without making a bubble on the afternoon’s surface. Alone again, Dr. Bauer passed a strong, neat hand over his brows, impatiently smoothed them, and made a final note about Mr. Schriever. The young man had talked off the top of his head again, hesitating, then rushing, and no question had been able to steer him into more promising paths. It was such people as Mr. Schriever that one had to believe one could finally help. The first barrier was always tension, it seemed to Dr.

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