The Talented Miss Highsmith (13 page)

Mary's chatty letter introducing Tommy Tune to Pat (written only four months before she and Pat had collided at Camilla Butterfield's tea party) was, allowing for differences in style, exactly the kind of letter Pat herself loved to send out to her hundreds of correspondents every year. Mary uses her sentences as a broom to sweep up all the external details of her life. When she isn't in a depression (Pat, too, was often depressed), Mary, just like Pat, is always infernally busy. In this letter, she's readying two drawings for an exhibition at the Houston Museum, exchanging some Levi's for Pat (who would wear only Levi-Strauss 501 jeans sent from Texas), painting her cement side porch, covering the fruit trees against a frost, puttying the windows, setting out bulbs in the garden beds which she has outlined with stones, and espousing a “CAUSE—that of saving the Majestic Theatre.”
³⁸

While Mary is working her socks off, her husband, Stanley [“I have relieved him of everything around the place in order for him to have his precious time”]; is “fast becoming a problem.” Mary wants to ask Pat's “advice on how to help Stanley,” who “fritters away his [retirement] time,” reading in “PREPARATION” for becoming the writer he has always wanted to be.

“Well, you and I know that [preparation] can go on forever…. My heart bleeds for him to have some sort of satisfaction and feeling of achievement. But how can he in the manner he's chosen?”
³⁹

The complicity in this appeal from one “artist” to another is unmistakable. Mary knows how her complaints about Stanley will please Pat, who has “disliked” (the mild verb Pat generally uses for the boiling, seething, twitching hatred for Stanley Highsmith she spent her childhood repressing) her stepfather since she was introduced to him at the age of three and a half. And then Mary begins to fret that Pat, in her freezing cottage in Suffolk, “can't do your best work and be cold. Do you use only one door in exiting? Do you realize how wonderful newspaper is for insulation?” And she goes on for several hundred words about how Pat can warm up her house and then rattles on for another few hundred words about their mutual interest in the genealogy of their maternal family line: the Stewarts.
⁴⁰

Mary and Pat's Troubles (long enough and bitter enough to be capitalized) began with the sleight of hand that reshuffled the cards of Pat Highsmith's parentage. It was, on the face of it, a reshuffling that made Pat's birth possible and allowed Mary to sustain her child and give her a future. But the whole business left little Patsy, as she was called in childhood, feeling cheated of just about everything.

Pat lost her father before she was born, and she lost him completely. Mary refused (and even Pat thought her refusal admirable) to take any money from Jay B Plangman for their daughter, and Plangman seems to have dealt himself—or perhaps he was dealt—out of the family deck, never making a recorded attempt to see his only child while she was living with Willie Mae in Fort Worth and Mary was out earning a living.

But Pat, for the first few years of her life, also lost a mother: figuratively, because of the circumstances of their housing, and then actually, because Mary travelled far and wide to get work, and then remarried. Although Pat frequently blamed the loss of her father on her mother, it was the repeated loss of her mother, Mary, that threw Patricia Highsmith into a persistent mourning for her life.

Part 2

When Mary Coates—twenty-five years old, pregnant, separated from her husband, set on divorcing and continuing a career in fashion illustration—stepped back over the threshold of the Coates family boardinghouse in Fort Worth, Texas, she surrendered much of her maternal authority. Her departure for Chicago to look for a job three weeks after she gave birth to her baby girl transferred whatever was left of that power.
¹
Mary's infant came under the jurisdiction of the woman who, as Mary wrote plaintively, had “tried her sorely,” curbed her socially (“In high school I finally quit having dates [she] was so hard on me about them”), and made her feel a parental disapproval so strong that Mary swore “no daughter of mine would suffer that.”
²

This commanding figure, still dominating Mary well into middle age, was the diminutive, nearsighted, Alabama-born doctor's daughter whose double first name bridged both genders, whose Southern Calvinist heritage was founded on Puritan rock—her great-grandson Don says that “her back never touched a chair's back”—and whose rule over the Coates family was absolute: Mary's mother and Pat's grandmother, the invincible Willie Mae Stewart Coates.

“Grandma,” says Willie Mae's great-grandson Don, “was a tiny little thing.

“If you saw Grandma in a car sitting in a passenger seat, the only thing you saw above the doorline was her head. And Grandpa was just as tall as he could be.”

Don's elder brother Dan remembered: “Willie Mae was the cutest, toughest little ‘toot' who ever lived. Mary came by her strong personality from Willie Mae.”

In home movies of the Coates family shot in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, it is the self-possessed Willie Mae who draws the spectator's gaze, just as Mary and Pat do when they're being filmed or photographed with other people. Mary Highsmith, in a typical family film shot at her Hastings-on-Hudson house in New York State, has put a stalk of celery in her hair, and her mugging and manifestations for the camera manage to crowd nearly everyone else out of the frame. Pat, the reverse
médaille
of this regiment of camera-ready women, makes herself as starched, as stiff, and as still as possible whenever she is caught on film. Her visual grammar is that of the reluctant star of a hostage video.
³

In photographs, Willie Mae and Mary resemble each other closely; Mary is the elongated, modish, nervous, flirtatious version of her mother. Pat, with her cat-shaped eyes, oval visage, and black hair, looks like no one in the Coates or Stewart (Willie Mae's maiden name) family. Of the three generations of women, it is Willie Mae who moves with the kind of definition and authority that allowed her to make such an impression—such a
different
impression—on the lives of both Mary and Patricia Highsmith.
^*

Willie Mae Stewart Coates was born in Alabama in September of 1866. Much of the personal power she always seemed to possess came from the Calvinist line in her heritage, stretching backwards for generations. Her long family history of religious devotion and involvement in social justice was marked by the spiritual rebellions and odd, intense pieties that would trouble her granddaughter Patricia all her life.

In the careful genealogy worked out in 1954 by the biographer of Pat's relation,
^*
Confederate general A. P. Stewart (later president of the University of Misssippi at Oxford), the Stewart family to which Willie Mae Coates belonged was firmly established as being of Scots-Irish origin. The American branch of the Stewart clan associated itself with the tonier “Baltimore Stewarts,” and Willie Mae's grandfather, William Stewart, was second-generation Scots-Irish. He traced his origins, Pat was pleased to note, to Ninion Stewart, younger son of James I of Scotland and brother of James II.
⁴

William Stewart, whose maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, moved from his birthplace in Delaware to Tennessee, where he became the postmaster of Winchester and the treasurer of Franklin County: a leading citizen and a public official. The records of the Winchester, Tennessee, Masonic Lodge No. 158 show that he was a Presbyterian and a “man of undoubted piety”
⁵
whose reverence took a curiously physical turn: his “frequent and protracted kneeling in the act of prayer” are said to have worn holes in his bedroom carpet.
⁶
He married Elizabeth Decherd (now spelled Deckerd), and Elizabeth, a serious convert to Methodism, bore sixteen children and died in 1847, a “bright ornament of the Methodist Church.” She, too, was intensely devout: “a truly praying woman.”

The Stewart children were raised in the Presbyterian church, although two of the Stewart sons became well-known Methodist preachers. These conversions to (and promulgations of) Methodism in a devotedly Presbyterian family were as shocking a heresy in their day as an open profession of Communism would have been in the McCarthy era.
⁷
Pat's grandmother Willie Mae, who followed the family's Methodist line, joined the St. Mark's Methodist Church in Fort Worth.
⁸
Affirming her faith, Willie Mae named one of her sons after the early Methodist spiritual leader John Wesley, whose principles of social justice later surfaced in peculiarly twisted forms in the musings of Willie Mae's novelist granddaughter. Underscoring the family's religious bent, Willie Mae's grandparents William and Elizabeth Stewart had spent eleven years in the “strict Presbyterian community” of Rogersville, Tennessee (even though Elizabeth was a Methodist), a community founded by the grandparents of the legendary American frontiersman Davy Crockett. Their eighth child, Oscar Wilkinson Stewart, Willie Mae's father, was first a schoolmaster and then a doctor who served out his Civil War duties as a surgeon.
⁹

Unlike the Coates family into which his granddaughter Willie Mae would marry, William Stewart disapproved of the institution of slavery and never owned slaves himself. But the Stewarts' nine sons all served in the Confederate army and all of them were Masons.

This is straightforward enough as a family history—even with the family emphasis on radiant piety, and with what must have been troubling family divisions on the subjects of religion and slave owning. But then, slowly, something almost as interesting as the Presbyterian/Methodist split starts to work its way though successive generations of the Stewart family. Sets of brothers and sisters begin to marry other sets of sisters and brothers—as though the Stewart family were gradually developing double vision. The pious William Stewart, married to the saintly Elizabeth Decherd, had a brother, Charles Stewart. Charles Stewart married his brother's wife's sister, Ellen Decherd. Then two of William and Elizabeth Stewart's sons, Oscar Wilkinson and Leonidas, married the Pope sisters, Mary Ann Pope and Martha Clarissa Pope. And then two of Oscar Wilkinson Stewart's daughters, Martha and Willie Mae, married the Coates boys, Andrew Jackson Coates and Daniel Hokes Coates.

Pat Highsmith, who in later life entertained a mystical belief in the inherited properties of “blood,” would have known just what to say about all this doubling up and religious division in her family. She would have said that double trouble was in her blood from the moment she was conceived—and she would have blamed her mother, Mary, for it, too.

Daniel Hokes Coates, Willie Mae's husband, was the son of Gideon Coats, the man who founded Coats' Bend, Alabama. Coats' Bend was the Coates family's Big Historical Moment, one they never forgot. Like any Founding Father, Gideon Coates got his land from the Native Americans, the Cherokees: five thousand acres of it. Although the Coateses' founding of this township and the Coates family's Confederate war history figured largely in Pat's imagination,
^*
the Coates she lived with, her grandfather Daniel Coates, made little impression on her. In the current generation of Coateses', only Willie Mae, Mother Mary, and her cousin Dan were “real” for Pat. Still, almost all the Coates males were named for Willie Mae's husband, Daniel Hokes Coates, and for Willie Mae's father, Oscar Wilkinson Stewart. Willie Mae's great-grandson Don Coates explains the family's richly confusing tendency to double its nomenclature:

Mary Coates repeated the family custom (it was another way of reproducing herself) when she gave her own first name to her only child. “Mary” was a name Pat Highsmith refused to live or die with, but she used it in her most revealing early short story, “The Legend of the Convent of St. Fotheringay,” and in many stories thereafter.

Some instinct for strict propriety, upright appearance, and the desire not to be confused with criminals—Pat sustained this odd combination of urges all her life—caused the Coats family, sometime after Coats' Bend was incorporated, to add an
e
to their last name. It seems, says Don Coates, that in Alabama “there were some men named Coats who were horse thieves and in those days [that was] the worst thing you could be. They hung you right on the spot. The family changed the name to Coates so that everyone in the South would know they weren't connected with the kind of people who would steal horses.”
¹¹

Coats' Bend, Alabama, was the site of the original of the many “houses of fiction” that figured in Pat Highsmith's life and work: the white, fourteen-room “Coats' Mansion” built in 1842 by Pat's slave-owning great-grandfather Gideon Coats in the best mortise-and-tenon tradition of fine carpentry, without the use of a single nail. Willie Mae, whose boardinghouse in Fort Worth was a working-class version of the plantation-style “mansion,” embroidered a picture of the Coats' Mansion for her Fort Worth wall, and her son Edward did the same thing for his wall.
¹²
Pat kept a photograph of the Coats' Mansion in one of her albums, referred to it regularly in her letters, and built it and rebuilt it in various ways in her novels. And in all her domiciles, she managed to reproduce something of the mansion's plantation ethos, inveigling some of her poorer neighbors into genial servitude and persuading wealthier friends and family members to run errands and do chores for her. Even at her most financially reduced, when she was just out of college and living in a one-room studio in Manhattan, Pat always had a weekly “maid” in to help with the cleaning.

In her mind, Pat settled quite comfortably into what Gore Vidal likes to call “Margaret Mitchell Country.” She was quick to cite
Gone with the Wind
as her favorite novel, insisting that it was “a true novel of the South.” (In that irresistible book, loyal, happy slaves serve their romantically unhappy masters until the Marauding Northerners come to Lay Waste to Our Southern Way of Life. And that's when Scarlett O'Hara, a feminist
avant la lettre,
decides to act now and think about the consequences “tomorrow.”) In 1977, Pat added to her preference for
Gone with the Wind
the opinion that her great-grandfather Gideon Coats's “110 body-slaves” (she
loved
the phrase “body-slaves”) were “not unhappy.”
¹³
The dreams and values of the Old South were still working their Mason-Dixon Line magic in Pat's imagination, fifty years after she'd heard them told to her in her grandmother's kitchen.

Willie Mae and Dan Coates and their five children travelled to Fort Worth, Texas, from Coats' Bend, Alabama, in 1904, mostly, says their great-grandson Don, because Dan Coates's sister Dolly was given the Coats' Mansion as well as the family cotton gin and grist mill, and Dan and Willie Mae didn't want to “carry the rest of the family financially.” When the Coateses went west, they travelled in style. Family legend has it that Willie Mae and Daniel “had all their possessions…the crystal and china and silver and all of that packed into bales of cotton and they rented a [railway car] and put all of those bales of cotton with the crystal and the china and the silver in the train car with all their furniture and then they rented another railway car for the family itself.”
¹⁴

It's like a fairy tale, and it probably
was
a fairy tale: the entire family travelling from Alabama to Texas in a private railway car with everything they owned wrapped up in snowy bales of cotton. But it was the trains themselves (along with the strict timetables that governed them) and not the billowing cotton bales that would catch the imagination of the family's writing granddaughter.
^*

Somewhere on that cross-country journey, despite the private railway car and the wrapped-in-cotton furniture, Willie Mae and her family seem to have gotten a lot poorer. By the time they fetched up in Fort Worth, a modest boardinghouse was all they could afford, and Daniel Coates went to work driving a wagon to deliver the local newspaper, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
in downtown Fort Worth.
¹⁵
But the life the Coates family constructed in Fort Worth was a demotic version of the plantation life they'd left behind. There was, first, the Main House on West Daggett Avenue in which boarders were housed and fed by Willie Mae and at which factory workers sometimes took their meals. Pat, deploring the downward transmission of the Coateses, always referred to the boarders as “gentlemen,” but, said Dan Walton Coates, they were “just steady working people,” people