Free Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith Page A

that he did not want to be. He had wanted to live in a house or an apartment in which other people had lived before. He had felt that it was vaguely unfriendly and arrogant of him and his family to live in a house they had built themselves and owned. The apartment of his school friend had been by no means a shabby one, but rather luxurious. But years later, even into the present, the sight of a row of brownstones in New York, of ordinary house-fronts here in Venice, brought back the incident to him, and the same disquieting emotion: other people lived somehow in layer upon layer of humanity and history; his own family had a thin but rich new surface. Therefore there was, somehow, nothing for him to stand on.
    At twenty, while going to Princeton, Ray had become engaged to a St Louis girl whom he had known since he was eighteen. He had thought he was in love with her, but he hardly knew how the engagement had happened. Of course, he had done the proposing, verbally, but in a way the girl had, and both their families had exerted pressure simply by ‘approving.’ A year later, just before graduating, Ray had realized he didn’t love her at all, and he had had to break it off. The experience had been traumatic. He had barely passed his examinations. He had felt a heel, thinking he had wrecked the girl’s world, and one of the happiest moments of his life had been just after graduating, when he heard that the girl had got married. He really hadn’t hurt her at all, he realized. His patents, Ray thought, hadn’t had an inkling of what he had gone through that last year in university, though they took great interests in his grades, and whom he knew, and whether he was ‘happy and doing well.’
    He listened—with more pleasure than he usually listened to jazz, which in Mallorca had nearly driven him mad—to the free and easy expertise coming from the boy’s transistor, music that the plump barber cutting his hair now, and the other two barbers and the men in the chairs, seemed not to hear at all, and Ray felt that anything in the world that he wished might be possible. It was, theoretically, possible and true. Yet he realized also that he lacked the dash to make any of it come true, and that the thought had come to him because of the jazz and because of his fever. He was timid, quite unlike his father whose word was law and who did what he wanted to do, or what needed to be done, in one slashing stroke. Ray wanted his self-effacement, which even sometimes caused him to stammer with strangers. He detested his money, but there were always places to get rid of it, and Ray was using them—helping to support a couple of painters in New York, anonymous gifts (small compared to millionaires’ gifts, but he hadn’t come into his father’s money as yet) to broken-down churches in England, to relief committees for Italian and Austrian villages buried under landslides, to a couple of organizations for the improvement of racial relations. Ray could have had even more money. He had instructed his trust fund bankers to send him a sum he considered adequate; but because he did not use all his income, money was piling up in the trust fund, making more daily, despite the whacks of income tax and his occasional request for five thousand dollars for a car, ten thousand for the boat he and Peggy had bought in Mallorca.
    When he left the barbershop, he walked in the direction of the bar-caffé near the Campo Manin. It was after five o’clock and growing dark. The girl might not be working now, Ray thought, if she started so early in the morning.
    He found the bar-caffé, and she was not behind the counter. Ray felt very disappointed. He stood at the counter and ordered from the small boy a cappuccino he did not want. He debated asking the boy about a room somewhere. Italians were very helpful about such things, and the boy looked bright, but Ray could not bring himself to risk it. The boy might tell other people. Then the blonde girl in her