The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Page A

acquired, anyway, and that was useful. Tom had opened the big gates for her, and he waved as she drove through and turned right.
    By a quarter past nine that evening, Tom was lying on his bed with his shoes off, reading Frank’s manuscript, or account. It went:
    Saturday 22nd July had started like an ordinary day for me. Nothing unusual. The sun was shining and it was what everybody called a great day, meaning the weather. The day is doubly strange to me now, because I had no idea in the morning how it was going to end. I had no plans about anything. I remember Eugene asked me around three that afternoon if I wanted to play some tennis, since there were no visitors (guests) and he had some time. I said no, don’t know why I said no. I tried to phone Teresa then, and her mother said she was out (Bar Harbor) and for the evening too and wouldn’t be home till maybe after midnight. I felt very jealous, wondering whom she was with, even a lot of people or just one, it would have been the same feeling. I decided I would go to New York the next day no matter what, even if I couldn’t use our apartment which was closed for the summer with drapes over the furniture and all. I would telephone Teresa and persuade her to come to New York, and we could either take a hotel room for several days or she could stay with me in the New York apartment. I wanted to make a move, and NY seemed great to suggest to her, to look forward to. I might have been in New York already except for the fact that my father wanted me to have “talks” with a guy called Bumpstead or something that sounded like that, who was going to be in Hyannisport for a couple of weeks vacationing. This Bumpstead is a businessman of some kind about 30, my dad said, My dad thought 30 would be young enough to convert me, I’m sure. To his way of life, business. This Bumpstead was due the next day. He didn’t come because of what happened.
    (Here Frank had switched to a ballpoint pen.)
    But I was trying to think of bigger things, of my whole life, if I could. I was trying to sum my life up, as Maugham says in a paperback I have called The Summing Up , but I am not sure I could or that I got very far with it. I had been reading some Somerset Maugham short stories (very good), and they seemed to understand everything, in just a few pages. I tried to think what is my life for , as if my life of course had a meaning, which is not necessarily so. I tried to think what I wanted from life, and all I could think of was Teresa, because I am so happy when I am with her, and she seems happy too, and I thought with the two of us together, we’d arrive at something called a meaning, or happiness, or going forward. I know I want to be happy and I think everyone should be happy and not confined by anything or anyone. By this I mean comfortable physically, and as to how they live. But
    (Frank had crossed out the but and switched to the typewriter again.)
    I remember after lunch my mother’s friend Tal with us, my father as usual made some remark about having the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall repaired. It hasn’t run for about a year, and Dad was always talking about getting it repaired, but he didn’t trust any of the local places to do it and didn’t want to send it to NY. It is an old clock from his family. I was bored at lunch. My mother and Tal managed to laugh a lot but they have their own jokes about people they know in NY.
    After lunch I heard my father screaming on the telephone to Tokyo in the library. I switched off and waited in the hall. My father said he had something he wanted to say to me. Finally, this was to come and see him in the library around 6 p.m. I thought he could have told me that at lunch. I then went to my room, feeling angry. The others started playing croquet on the side lawn.
    I detested my father, that I will admit, and I have heard that a lot of people detest their fathers. This does not mean that a person has to kill his father. I think I