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| Illustration by Andrea Ucini |
The World's Champion Ball-Bouncer by Patricia Highsmith – a brilliant story unseen for 73 years
In this previously uncollected short story by The Talented Mr Ripley author, a young girl struggles to adjust to life in New York
Patricia HighsmithSaturday 9 January 2021
“Ellie, eat your breakfast,” Elspeth’s mother said from behind her, in the kind of voice she used when she was thinking about something else. “Just look how thick the cream is this morning.”
“Mm-hmm,” Elspeth murmured politely. She wrung her hands in her lap and looked down at her oatmeal that was still steaming though surrounded by cream like a grey castle in a lake.
It was no use for her mother to pretend that the cream just happened to be thick this morning. It was thick because they were in New York. Everything they had this morning was boughten and very expensive. The coffee smelled shiny black, she could taste the bacon in the air. Yet beneath the breakfast smell was the smell of the room itself, an unfriendly and mixed-up smell of sweetness like ladies’ perfume and powder, the clothiness of carpets and upholstery and the hot paint from the radiator. Elspeth could tell that many other people had lived here before them. It was not a definite smell such as she had noticed in certain people’s houses.
“Mother, is this house a church?” Elspeth asked anxiously.
“No, darling. It’s an apartment building.”
Through her sleepiness last night when they arrived; Elspeth had remembered the coloured glass in the windows of a door downstairs.
“Not even part of a church?”
“No, Ellie. Where’d you get that idea? It’s just a big apartment house. There are lots of big buildings like this in New York.”
Elspeth turned back, quelled.
She remembered how the name of New York had excited her when she heard it at home. She had used to jump and yell, “I want to go to New York now!” like a silly thing whenever her parents had talked about going north. She had even boasted to Francey Pat and Jordy, her two best friends, that she was going north, where she would have all sorts of adventures and would see things they couldn’t begin to think of. Now she felt old and ashamed of herself. Last night she had gone to sleep thinking of the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, and the trips she would make up and down in it. But now she did not want to go.
She pushed her clasped hands deeper into her lap and lowered her eyes. “Excuse me, New York. Excuse me.” She did not even whisper, but her lips moved.
“You must write to Mrs Sears and thank her for the pocketbook, Ellie. It was thoughtful of her to give you a going-away present.”
“Um-hmm.”
Her mother stood behind her, smoothing her limp yellow-tan hair that splayed over the round cotton collar of her dress. Fortified by her mother’s hands, by the tuneless yet familiar tune her mother hummed as her hands slipped under her chin, Elspeth leaned back against her and surveyed the room in a slow worried manner.
The room had a strange public look. Her family’s things just seemed to sit in it like bundles in a waiting-room. The walls were a cold grey-white and Elspeth was aware that their smudges and the worn spots in the carpet had been made by other people they did not know. There was a long tub with real legs in the bathroom and there were brown streaks below the faucets where the water kept running down with a spooky sound like people whispering excitedly. She had heard it last night from the cot in the corner where she slept. She could hear it now every once in a while when the coffeepot stopped chugging.
“Why did Daddy go out again?”
“He went out to look for a paper. He’ll be back directly.”
“Don’t they deliver papers up here?”
“Of course, when people have been here long enough. But we just came yesterday, Ellie. Do you suppose they know we want a paper?” Her mother bent down and laughed, trying to make her laugh too.
Elspeth’s mouth was set in a short horizontal line. There was nothing funny to her in the fact that no one knew or cared whether they got the Sunday paper or not. Suddenly the scary feeling that had been crawling around in her sprang all over her at once.
“Mother, what is the matter with this house?” Her voice sounded as shrill as though she were crying.
“Nothing, darling! What do you mean?”
Abashedly Elspeth bowed her head, as though she had seen something she shouldn’t have seen. In that instant she knew that her mother knew. There was something the matter with the house and with the whole morning. It was something they could feel, hear, taste, smell – everything but see. Something that made her sit small and hold her breath, unable to find words to tell her mother the feeling. If her mother did not talk about it, maybe it was not to be talked about. Would the feeling go away, Elspeth wondered, or would something happen?
The light from the two tall windows was thin and glaring at once, reaching the farthest corners of the room. Elspeth’s mother was still so pale from long protection against an impossible sun that the strange light seemed to pass through her as through a new blade of grass. She was in her late twenties and looked even younger.
She turned finally from her contemplation of the windows and lowered the fire under the bacon, slipping the egg flipper beneath the five rashers and turning them neatly.
She felt again the sensation of solemn lonely commencement in what she did. She had thought, this was the first meal she cooked in New York, these were the first pieces of bacon. And now, absurdly, she thought, this was the first time she turned their first New York bacon. There was, in the simple things that each of the three of them had done that morning, a quality of drama and inauguration that would have made her laugh had it not borne also a sense of their aloneness. She would remember the feeling of this Sunday all her life. This room that was indifferent to their presence as the whole north was indifferent, the hum of outdoors raised to a climax now and then by a rumble that she knew must be the elevated train, the sound of a phonograph down the hall playing a popular song over and over.
Incredulously she realised that all her senses told her of this morning and this city was destined to become so much part of her that what she knew of other mornings and another city would become unfamiliar, perhaps also tinged with fear. She would remember always, and the start in her heart as she remembered would always recapture precisely her consciousness of this instant in this room.
This morning the gas hadn’t been connected and the superintendent had told her it couldn’t be fixed until Monday. She had stood there, burning with shame at her own rude insistence, saying, “But I’d like it so much – if you possibly could.” Until finally the superintendent, with an ungraciousness that was the last humiliation, had fetched the janitor and she had the gas connected just before AJ came back from the grocery store.
She did not tell AJ, though. There would be enough little difficulties later that both would know about. She felt proud of herself for succeeding with the superintendent. Everybody had told her that in the north you had to be persistent and finally northerners liked you for it. That was the way AJ would have to be tomorrow when he looked for a job. It was hard to imagine him being really persistent, but surely his samples would speak for themselves. If he was the best letterer in Birmingham, he was bound to be worth a job somewhere in New York. And all at once she realised her really limitless faith in him.
It was strange, but she had more faith now that they were in New York than she had known back home, when they had talked of coming up. So many times they had discussed it, whether to go, then when to go, frightened as birds about to take a first flight from the nest. “Anyone with real ambition,” AJ had often said at those times, “wants to go to New York, Lei.” But each new discussion had been followed by seconds of silence in which each of them, and even Ellie, had looked into a particular dream of New York composed of skyscrapers, multitudes and somehow a happier life for all of them, yet a dream that was frozen by the fear that somehow they might not be good enough to stay in New York once they got there. Yet now we are here, Leila thought, and the first hardship is over. The superintendent that morning, for instance, had not been the stone wall he seemed at first. All it would take was courage and perseverance, and she was sure all three of them had both.
She caught sight of the new sable fur piece that hung inside the closet door and a throb of another kind of remembrance went through her. Mama and Lettie and her brother Reeves had given it to her Thursday night. It was too fine for the rest of her wardrobe, as yet too new and too much itself to seem her own possession. They had given it to her as a kind of armour against the unknown north, an assertion to all strangers of her own and of her family’s decency. The fur piece, unlike the room, would grow with her. She would never quite feel again, even the next time she looked at it, her own youth. and vulnerability and pride as she did at this moment.
Elspeth twisted her hands, but now with pleasure. “I really am!”
She was glad she had waited.
“Oh, you really. are?” he mocked her.
Leila followed him with her eyes as he hung his topcoat in the closet and adjusted his cuffs in the neat shy way she had noticed the first time she met him. She would never forget the way he had smiled just now when she opened the door. I have made this room a home for him already, she thought, knowing she would never tell him of her fear while he was gone that something might have happened to him.
“Had to walk a good ways to find a New York Times. I wanted it for the wart ads.” He smiled as he sat down at the bridge table, careful not to bump the fragile legs. “And you know, Lei, the fellow in the grocery store didn’t know what I meant by ‘sweet milk.’ He said, ‘Wha-at?’” AJ stretched his neck toward Elspeth to make her laugh. “Oh, really!” Leila laughed, half closing her eyes and turning her head, as she often did when she was amused, but now mainly because AJ expected her to be amused.
“Finally he understood I wanted milk but he told me he didn’t have any sweet. ‘Then give me some buttermilk,’ I said. ‘We got no buttermilk either,’ he said.” AJ reached for a piece of toast, laughing, but with a shadow across his blue eyes. He remembered the three people who had come into the store after him, their impatient smiles to one another during his stumbling conversation with the counterman, his realisation that he spoke quite a different language from theirs. “Anyway,” he finished, blushing a little, for he had not made Leila and Ellie laugh so much as he had hoped, “there isn’t any sweet milk in New York. It’s either milk or buttermilk.”
Elspeth forced a little laugh for the first time. “How funny,” she remarked. And suddenly she sounded grown-up to herself, for she had said this just to be nice, knowing that in the store, her daddy had felt the very same scary feeling she and her mother had felt here in the room. Elspeth was embarrassed. She wanted to hang her head, to get up from the table and run outdoors. But here she could not go outdoors.
“Mother, may I have some coffee?” she asked recklessly.
“Of course you may, honey!” Her mother smiled and Elspeth watched the cup grow more than half full while her mother and daddy talked. Elspeth poured cream into her coffee from a little bottle shaped like a milk bottle, and watched as it swirled richly, making her coffee brown, then light tan. Slowly and guardedly she put three teaspoonfuls of sugar into it, expecting at each second to be challenged. But no one noticed. Elspeth stirred and stirred, then started to sip, but suddenly her mouth twisted up so she could not fit it to the cup. She began to cry, spilling the coffee as she tried to set it down.
“Elspeth!”
“What’s the matter, Ellie?”
Elspeth bent her head lower and lower. She did not know exactly what was the matter except everything. She did not want the coffee. At home she wouldn’t have been allowed coffee. It was one more proof.
“She’s tired,” her mother said.
“No, I’m not!” Elspeth protested, lifting her head as high as she had bent it low. She got up from the table with dignity and went slowly to the window, not making a sound, although she was crying. She wanted to say casually that she was simply not hungry, but she could not trust herself to talk.
“Come on back and let’s finish up:” her daddy called from the table. “Then we’ll all look at the funny papers together. Bet you never saw such a lot of funny papers as they have up here. I’ve got three papers with funny papers.”
Elspeth found she had not the least desire to read the funny papers. She began to cry again, silently, with a twisted turned-away face. Something really awful was wrong if the funny papers didn’t seem like anything. She heard her parents talking about her but she did not even care to listen.
She stood by the window gazing dully out at the dirty yellow-gray face of the building across the street. The sills of the windows were thick and made of a pinkish stone. There was a blue awning at the front door that came all the way down to the sidewalk on the sides.
She could see a door cut in each side, besides the opening at the end. She watched a fat man in a black suit walk through one side door and out the other, like a marble that rolled through a box with holes cut out.
She began to look at the street with more interest. A little girl had come out of the apartment house and was bouncing a ball on the sidewalk near the awning. She threw one leg, then the other, over the ball at regular intervals. A man passed and jostled her, but she kept the ball bouncing without a miss. The little girl was just about her size, Elspeth thought, only plumper. She wore a green jumper dress and no hat, and her hair swung in beautiful dark braids. She began to bounce the ball against the house, making it hit the sidewalk on its return and land right in her hands as though it were on a rubber band.
Then she bounced the ball in front of her and threw both legs over! It occurred to Elspeth suddenly, with a feeling of awe, that the little girl might be the world’s champion ball-bouncer. The champion would certainly live in New York.
“Ellie?” her mother said slowly from behind her.
Elspeth twisted all the way around without moving her feet. “I’m watching out the window,” she said, not wanting to miss anything of the little girl. When her mother came over Elspeth said, “Look.”
“Why, she’s just about your own age. Maybe she’s someone for you to play with.”
“Yes,” Elspeth said, smitten with shyness. How could she ever play with the world’s champion ball-bouncer?
“Why don’t you go down and say hello to her, Ellie? I bet she’d like someone to play with.”
“I don’t feel like it,” Elspeth said quietly.
“Of course you do. Run down and get acquainted with her. She can tell you all about New York and you can tell her about home. Won’t you like that?”
Before Elspeth could say anything, her mother was brushing her hair, getting her hat and her red bolero from the closet. “You go down and look up and see if you can see us,” her mother said, patting her gently in the direction of the door. “We’re on the eighth floor. Be careful crossing the street.”
Elspeth walked sombrely toward the elevator and rang the elevator bell without even waiting to gather her courage. The elevator stopped almost immediately. “By-by, darling,” her mother called. Her voice sounded so sweet, echoing in the hall, that Elspeth did not want to leave.
In the elevator Elspeth’s lowered eyes saw, besides the elevator man’s uniformed trousers, the ankles and feet of a man and a woman. The woman had long thin feet in pointed black pumps. Elspeth thought she would never forget the look of those feet, the stiff staring faces above them that she could imagine and could not look at.
She walked straight through the lobby toward the coloured glass doors, one of which opened as a man came in. Everything happened fast, as though the whole world intended to get her outside with the world’s champion ball-bouncer. There was not even a passing car to delay her in crossing the street at the corner.
On the sidewalk, tossing one leg, then the other, then filling an interval with little dancing, mock leg-throwing steps that kept in perfect rhythm with the bouncing ball, the plump little girl continued her wonderful performance and might not have stopped in all the time it took for Elspeth to be brushed and hatted and sent down to the place where she stood on the same sidewalk with her.
“Hello,” Elspeth whispered, trying her voice.
Then she sneaked close to the building against which the little girl bounced the ball. Elspeth pressed herself back against the yellow grey bricks and raised her eyes to the building where her parents were. The pattern of the rows upon rows of windows made her eyes swim and her heart began to beat violently. Somewhere up there her parents stood looking down at her. Then she brought her eyes down to the bottom, counted one, two, three, up to eight and swept her eyes across, almost losing the row.
There they were, at the window with the thin white curtains that looked grey. They were waving slowly, as though they had been waving a long while, waiting for her to find them. Elspeth started to wave, then brought her arm down hard at her side, not wanting to call attention to herself. They were waiting for her to make a move toward the world’s champion ball-bouncer. She had to.
Elspeth gathered herself and it was a pain when she began to move. She thought as she approached the little girl, her head hanging, that there was probably some place in New York that awarded prizes for various things and that surely this little girl had competed and easily won in the contest for sidewalk ball-bouncing.
Elspeth was only some ten feet away now and still the rubber ball bounced as though the little girl did not even notice her, her throat was dry again and she wondered if she could speak “Bok – bok – bok!” went the little rubber ball after a tiny hissing sound at the beginning of each bounce.
Elspeth stood still. She was so close she could see fine hairs coat the little girl’s plump legs. She was SO close, she had come so far, she felt it was the other girl’s turn now. She should stop bouncing and look at her, but she did not. Elspeth stood there as long as she could, doing nothing, then heard her own voice say: “Hello.”
The ball darted into the little girl’s hand and disappeared. as though it were hiding itself away at the mere sight or Elspeth. The little girl stared at Elspeth without any expression at all. Her eyes were dark brown and rather large, her mouth unsmiling, and there was neither curiosity nor hostility nor even a simple not-seeing in her face.
“How’re you?” Elspeth asked desperately.
Still the little girl stared at her, her eyes moving slowly from Elspeth’s round-brimmed hat that sat on the back of her head down to her patent leather shoes with buttoned cross-straps, and up again to a point near her chin. She took a step back, then began to concentrate on her bouncing. The ball bounced down, down, as oblivious of Elspeth as before she had arrived.
“My name is Elspeth Levering,” Elspeth squeezed out. The name hung in the air like a delicate naked thing Like herself.
The other little girl stopped, stared longer, then took another step back. Her arm moved as though she was about to throw the ball, then she looked at Elspeth once more. “You sure talk funny,” she said.
Elspeth started at the sound of her voice, feeling the unfriendliness before she made out the words. For the little girl had spoken so quickly, it took a moment for Elspeth to understand. Then Elspeth crumpled as though she were making a deep bow and fled.
She did not remember how she crossed the street or entered the red apartment house. She did not realise anything until she stood again in the elevator. She dashed down the hall and tapped on her parents’ door. She pushed her face into her mother, embracing her high around her waist.
“Ellie!”
“Back so soon, Ellie?”
Elspeth released her mother and swallowed. They expected her to have succeeded and she had failed. She had failed her parents.
“What’s her name?” her daddy smiled from the bed where he sat reading the papers.
“Is she nice?” her mother asked.
Elspeth nodded “Her name’s Helen,” she replied, looking around at the floor. Then she walked quickly to the closet, slipping the hat string from beneath her chin. “She’s awful nice. Only she said she had to go some place right away, so I didn’t stay.”
“Well, that’s nice,” her mother said, so pleased-sounding that Elspeth’s fib hurt her deeply. “Are you going to see her again?”
“Uh-huh. Tomorrow. After school.”
The last word made Elspeth’s heart turn over and lie like a heavy thing. She stared straight ahead, wide-eyed. School tomorrow was a real something to be afraid of, an unknown school with unknown boys and girls. She would be really alone then, facing people like the world’s champion ball-bouncer multiplied a thousand times!
“Oh, Ellie!”
She felt her mother’s fingers in her hair, holding her head close against her. Elspeth could not press her face hard enough against her mother, for she could feel the tears running hopelessly out of her eyes now and she did not want her mother to see. She did not know why her mother held her so, but she knew she felt better because she had fibbed about the little girl across the street. Tomorrow, at the new school, she would make up for it by making friends with a lot of people, even if each one was twice as unfriendly as the world’s champion ball-bouncer. She felt her father pat her back and knew he had stooped down behind her too.
It was funny. Elspeth thought they were both as quiet as she during that long minute while she held her breath.
Footnote added 13 January 2021: The World’s Champion Ball Bouncer was published in Woman’s Home Companion in 1947 but has never been published in a book of Highsmith’s stories so has been unavailable to most readers until now.
Under a Dark Angel’s Eye: The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith is published by Virago (RRP £20) on 14 January.
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