'HELLO-O, Tom, my boy!" Mr Greenleaf said in a voice that promised good martinis, a gourmet's dinner, and a bed for the night in case he got too tired to go home. 'Emily, this is Tom Ripley!'
'I'm so happy to meet you!' she said warmly.
'How do you do, Mrs Greenleaf?'
She was very much what he had expected—blonde, rather tall and slender, with enough formality to keep him on his good behaviour, yet with the same naive good-will-toward-all that Mr Greenleaf had. Mr Greenleaf led them into the living-room. Yes, he had been here before with Dickie.
'Mr Ripley's in the insurance business,' Mr Greenleaf announced, and Tom thought he must have had a few already, or he was very nervous tonight, because Tom had given him quite a description last night of the advertising agency where he had said he was working.
'Not a very exciting job,' Tom said modestly to Mrs Greenleaf.
A maid came into the room with a tray of martinis and canapés.
'Mr Ripley's been here before,' Mr Greenleaf said. 'He's come here with Richard.'
'Oh, has he? I don't believe I met you, though.' She smiled. 'Are you from New York?'
'No, I'm from Boston,' Tom said. That was true.
About thirty minutes later—just the right time later, Tom thought, because the Greenleafs had kept insisting that he drink another and another martini—they went into a dining-room off the living-room, where a table was set for three with candles, huge dark-blue dinner napkins, and a whole cold chicken in aspic. But first there was céleri rémoulade. Tom was very fond of it. He said so.
'So is Richard!' Mrs Greenleaf said. 'He always liked it the way our cook makes it. A pity you can't take him some.'
'I'll put it with the socks,' Tom said, smiling, and Mrs Greenleaf laughed. She had told him she would like him to take Richard some black woollen socks from Brooks Brothers, the kind Richard always wore.
The conversation was dull, and the dinner superb. In answer to a question of Mrs Greenleaf's, Tom told her that he was working for an advertising firm called Rothenberg, Fleming and Barter. When he referred to it again, he deliberately called it Reddington, Fleming and Parker. Mr Greenleaf didn't seem to notice the difference. Tom mentioned the firm's name a second time when he and Mr Greenleaf were alone in the living room after dinner.
'Did you go to school in Boston?' Mr Greenleaf asked.
'No, sir. I went to Princeton for a while, then I visited another aunt in Denver and went to college there.' Tom waited, hoping Mr Greenleaf would ask him something about Princeton, but he didn't. Tom could have discussed the system of teaching history, the campus restrictions, the atmosphere at the weekend dances, the political tendencies of the student body, anything. Tom had been very friendly last summer with a Princeton junior who had talked of nothing but Princeton, so that Tom had finally pumped him for more and more, foreseeing a time when he might be able to use the information. Tom had told the Greenleafs that he had been raised by his Aunt Dottie in Boston. She had taken him to Denver when he was sixteen, and actually he had only finished high school there, but there had been a young man named Don Mizell rooming in his Aunt Bea's house in Denver who had been going to the University of Colorado. Tom felt as if he had gone there, too.
'Specialise in anything in particular?' Mr Greenleaf asked.
'Sort of divided myself between accounting and English composition,' Tom replied with a smile, knowing it was such a dull answer that nobody would possibly pursue it.
Mrs Greenleaf came in with a photograph album, and Tom sat beside her on the sofa while she turned through it. Richard taking his first step, Richard in a ghastly full-page colour photograph dressed and posed as the Blue Boy, with long blond curls. The album was not interesting to him until Richard got to be sixteen or so, long-legged, slim, with the wave tightening in his hair. So far as Tom could see, he had hardly changed between sixteen and twenty-three or -four, when the pictures of him stopped, and it was astonishing to Tom how little the bright, naive smile changed. Tom could not help feeling that Richard was not very intelligent, or else he loved to be photographed and thought he looked best with his mouth spread from ear to ear, which was not very intelligent of him, either.
'I haven't gotten round to pasting these in yet,' Mrs Greenleaf said, handing him a batch of loose pictures. 'These are all from Europe.'
They were more interesting: Dickie in what looked like a café in Paris, Dickie on a beach. In several of them he was frowning.
'This is Mongibello, by the way,' Mrs Greenleaf said, indicating a picture of Dickie pulling a rowboat up on the sand. The picture was backgrounded by dry, rocky mountains and a fringe of little white houses along the shore. 'And here's the girl there, the only other American who lives there.'
'Marge Sherwood,' Mr Greenleaf supplied. He sat across the room, but he was leaning forward, following the picture-showing intently.
The girl was in a bathing suit on the beach, her arms around her knees, healthy and unsophisticated-looking, with tousled, short blonde hair—the good-egg type. There was a good picture of Richard in shorts, sitting on the parapet of a terrace. He was smiling, but it was not the same smile, Tom saw. Richard looked more poised in the European pictures.
Tom noticed that Mrs Greenleaf was staring down at the rug in front of her. He remembered the moment at the table when she had said, 'I wish I'd never heard of Europe!' and Mr Greenleaf had given her an anxious glance and then smiled at him, as if such outbursts had occurred before. Now he saw tears in her eyes. Mr Greenleaf was getting up to come to her.
'Mrs Greenleaf,' Tom said gently, 'I want you to know that I'll do everything I can to make Dickie come back.'
'Bless you, Tom, bless you.' She pressed Tom's hand that rested on his thigh.
'Emily, don't you think it's time you went to bed?' Mr Greenleaf asked, bending over her.
Tom stood up as Mrs Greenleaf did.
'I hope you'll come again to pay us a visit before you go, Tom,' she said. 'Since Richard s gone, we seldom have any young men to the house. I miss them.'
'I'd be delighted to come again,' Tom said.
Mr Greenleaf went out of the room with her. Tom remained standing, his hands at his sides, his head high. In a large mirror on the wall he could sec himself: the upright, self-respecting young man again. He looked quickly away. He was doing the right thing, behaving the right way. Yet he had a feeling of guilt. When he had said to Mrs Greenleaf just now, I'll do everything I can... Well, he meant it. He wasn't trying to fool anybody.
He felt himself beginning to sweat, and he tried to relax. What was he so worried about? He'd felt so well tonight! When he had said that about Aunt Dottie - Tom straightened, glancing at the door, but the door had not opened. That had been the only time tonight when he had felt uncomfortable, unreal, the way he might have felt if he had been lying, yet it had been practically the only thing he had said that was true: My parents died when I was very small. I was raised by my aunt in Boston.
Mr Greenleaf came into the room. His figure seemed to pulsate and grow larger and larger. Tom blinked his eyes, feeling a sudden terror of him, an impulse to attack him before he was attacked.
'Suppose we sample some brandy?' Mr Greenleaf said, opening a panel beside the fireplace.
It's like a movie, Tom thought. In a minute, Mr Greenleaf or somebody else's voice would say, 'Okay, cut!' and he would relax again and find himself back in Raoul's with the gin and tonic in front of him. No, back in the Green Cage.
'Had enough?' Mr Greenleaf asked. 'Don't drink this, if you don't want it.'
Tom gave a vague nod, and Mr Greenleaf looked puzzled for an instant, then poured the two brandies.
A cold fear was running over Tom's body. He was thinking of the incident in the drugstore last week, though that was all over and he wasn't really afraid, he reminded himself, not now. There was a drugstore on Second Avenue whose phone number he gave out to people who insisted on calling him again about their income tax. He gave it out as the phone number of the Adjustment Department where he could be reached only between three-thirty and four on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. At these times, Tom hung around the booth in the drugstore, waiting for the phone to ring. When the druggist had looked at him suspiciously the second time he had been there, Tom had said that he was waiting for a call from his girl friend. Last Friday when he had answered the telephone, a man's voice had said, 'You know what we're talking about, don't you? We know where you live, if you want us to come to your place... We've got the stuff for you, if you've got it for us.' An insistent yet evasive voice, so that Tom had thought it was some kind of a trick and hadn't been able to answer anything. Then, 'Listen, we're coming right over. To your house.'
Tom's legs had felt like jelly when he got out of the phone booth, and then he had seen the druggist staring at him, wide-eyed, panicky-looking, and the conversation had suddenly explained itself: the druggist sold dope, and he was afraid that Tom was a police detective who had come to get the goods on him. Tom had started laughing, had walked out laughing uproariously, staggering as he went, because his legs were still weak from his own fear.
'Thinking about Europe?' Mr Greenleaf's voice said.
Tom accepted the glass Mr Greenleaf was holding out to him. 'Yes, I was,' Tom said.
'Well, I hope you enjoy your trip, Tom, as well as have some effect on Richard. By the way, Emily likes you a lot. She told me so. I didn't have to ask her.' Mr Greenleaf rolled his brandy glass between his hands. 'My wife has leukaemia, Tom.'
'Oh. That's very serious, isn't it?'
'Yes. She may not live a year.'
'I'm sorry to hear that,' Tom said.
Mr Greenleaf pulled a paper out of his pocket. 'I've got a list of boats. I think the usual Cherbourg way is quickest, and also the most interesting. You'd take the boat train to Paris, then a sleeper down over the Alps to Rome and Naples.'
'That'd be fine.' It began to sound exciting to him.
'You'll have to catch a bus from Naples to Richard's village. I'll write him about you—not telling him that you're an emissary from me,' he added, smiling, 'but I'll tell him we've met. Richard ought to put you up, but if he can't for some reason, there're hotels in the town. I expect you and Richard'll hit it off all right. Now as to money -' Mr Greenleaf smiled his fatherly smile. 'I propose to give you six hundred dollars in traveller's cheques apart from your round-trip ticket. Does that suit you? The six hundred should see you through nearly two months, and if you need more, all you have to do is wire me, my boy. You don't look like a young man who'd throw money down the drain.'
'That sounds ample, sir.'
Mr Greenleaf got increasingly mellow and jolly on the brandy, and Tom got increasingly close-mouthed and sour. Tom wanted to get out of the apartment. And yet he still wanted to go to Europe, and wanted Mr Greenleaf to approve of him. The moments on the sofa were more agonising than the moments in the bar last night when he had been so bored, because now that break into another gear didn't come. Several times Tom got up with his drink and strolled to the fireplace and back, and when he looked into the mirror he saw that his mouth was turned down at the corners.
Mr Greenleaf was rollicking on about Richard and himself in Paris, when Richard had been ten years old. It was not in the least interesting. If anything happened with the police in the next ten days, Tom thought, Mr Greenleaf would take him in. He could tell Mr. Greenleaf that he'd sublet his apartment in a hurry, or something like that, and simply hide out here. Tom felt awful, almost physically ill.
'Mr Greenleaf, I think I should be going.'
'Now? But I wanted to show you—Well, never mind. Another time.'
Tom knew he should have asked, 'Show me what?' and been patient while he was shown whatever it was, but he couldn't.
'I want you to visit the yards, of course!' Mr Greenleaf said cheerfully. 'When can you come out? Only during your lunch hour, I suppose. I think you should be able to tell Richard what the yards look like these days.'
'Yes—I could come in my lunch hour.'
'Give me a call any day, Tom. You've got my card with my private number. If you give me half an hour's notice, I'll have a man pick you up at your office and drive you out. We'll have a sandwich as we walk through, and he'll drive you back.'
I'll call you,' Tom said. He felt he would faint if he stayed one minute longer in the dimly lighted foyer, but Mr Greenleaf was chuckling again, asking him if he had read a certain book by Henry James.
'I'm sorry to say I haven't, sir, not that one,' Tom said.
'Well, no matter,' Mr Greenleaf smiled.
Then they shook hands, a long suffocating squeeze from Mr Greenleaf, and it was over. But the pained, frightened expression was still on his face as he rode down in the elevator, Tom saw. He leaned in the corner of the elevator in an exhausted way, though he knew as soon as he hit the lobby he would fly out of the door and keep on running, running, all the way home.