Synopsis: The Perfect Little Lady is a short story by Patricia Highsmith, published in 1975 in the collection Kleine Geschichtgen für Weiberfeinde. It tells the story of Theadora, a girl who, from birth, is considered a model of perfection. She is always impeccable, polite, and charming and embodies elegance and good manners. However, her reserved nature keeps her from other children, who view her suspiciously. While the others play and have fun, Theadora forges her path in a world that does not always accept her.
The Perfect Little Lady
Patricia Highsmith
(Full story)
Theadora, or Thea as she was called, was the perfect little lady born. Everyone said that who had seen her from her first months of life, when she was being wheeled about in her white satin-lined pram. She slept when she should have slept. Then she woke and smiled at strangers. She almost never wet her diapers. She was the easiest child in the world to toilet-train, and she learned to speak remarkably early. Next came reading when she was hardly two. And always she showed good manners. At three, she began to curtsy on being introduced to people. Her mother taught her this, of course, but Thea took to etiquette like a duck to water.
‘Thank you, I had a lovely time,’ she was saying glibly at four, dropping a farewell curtsy, on departing from children’s parties. She would return home with her little starched dress as neat and clean as when she had put it on. She took great care of her hair and nails. She was never dirty, and she watched other children running and playing, making mud pies, falling and skinning their knees, and she thought them utterly silly. Thea was an only child. Other mothers, more harassed than Thea’s mother, with two or three offspring to look after, praised Thea’s obedience and neatness, and Thea loved this. Thea basked also in the praise she got from her own mother. Thea and her mother adored each other.
Among Thea’s contemporaries, the gang age began at eight or nine or ten, if the word gang could be used for the informal group that roved the neighbourhood on roller skates and bicycles. It was a proper middle-class neighbourhood. But if a child didn’t join in the ‘crazy poker’ game in the garage of one of their parents, or go on aimless follow-my-leader bicycle rides through the residential streets, that child was nowhere. Thea was nowhere, as far as this gang went. ‘I couldn’t care less, because I don’t want to be one of them,anyway,’ Thea said to her mother and father.
‘Thea cheats at games. That’s why we don’t want her,’ said a ten-year-old boy in one of Thea’s father’s history classes.
Thea’s father Ted taught in a local grade school. He had long suspected the truth, but had kept his mouth shut and hoped for the best. Thea was a mystery to Ted. How could he, such an ordinary, plodding fellow, have begotten a full-blown woman?
‘Little girls are born women,’ said Thea’s mother Margot. ‘But little boys are not born men. They have to learn to be men. Little girls have already a woman’s character.’
‘But this isn’t character,’ Ted said. ‘It’s scheming. Character takes time to be formed. Like a tree.’
Margot smiled tolerantly, and Ted had the feeling he was talking like someone from the stone age, while his wife and daughter lived in the jet age.
Thea’s main objective in life seemed to be to make her contemporaries feel awful. She’d told a lie about another little girl, in regard to a little boy, and the little girl had wept and nearly had a nervous breakdown. Ted couldn’t remember the details, though he’d been able to follow the story when he had heard it first, summarized by Margot. Thea had managed to blame the other little girl for the whole thing. Machiavelli couldn’t have done better.
‘She’s simply not a ruffian,’ said Margot. ‘Anyway, she’s got Craig to play with, so she’s not alone.’
Craig was ten and lived three houses away. What Ted did not realize for a while was that Craig was ostracized too, and for the same reason. One afternoon, Ted observed one of the boys of the neighbourhood make a rude gesture, in ominous silence, as he passed Craig on the pavement.
‘Scum!’ Craig replied promptly. Then he trotted, in case the other boy gave chase, but the other boy simply turned and said:
‘And you’re a shit,like Thea!’
It was not the first time that Ted had heard such language from the local kids, but he certainly didn’t hear it often, and he was impressed.
‘But what do they do – all alone, Thea and Craig?’ Ted asked his wife.
‘Oh, they take walks. I dunno,’ said Margot. ‘I suppose Craig has a slight crush on her.’
Ted had thought of that. Thea had a candy-box prettiness that would assure her of boy friends by the time she reached her early teens, and of course Thea was starting earlier than that. Ted had no fear of misbehaviour on Thea’s part, because she was the teasing type, and basically prim.
What Thea and Craig were then engaged in was observing the construction of a dug-out, tunnel and two fireplaces in a vacant lot about a mile away. Thea and Craig would go there on their bicycles, conceal themselves in the bushes near by, and spy and giggle. A dozen or so of the gang were working like navvies, hauling out buckets of earth, gathering firewood, preparing roasted potatoes with salt and butter, which was the high point of all this slavery, around 6 p.m. Thea and Craig intended to wait until the excavation and embellishments were completed, and then they meant to smash the whole thing.
Meanwhile, Thea and Craig came up with what they called ‘a new ballgame’, this being their code word for a nasty scheme. They sent a typewritten announcement to the biggest blabber-mouth of the school, Veronica, saying that a girl called Jennifer was having a surprise birthday party on a certain date, and please tell everyone, but don’t tell Jennifer. The letter was presumably from Jennifer’s mother. Then Thea and Craig hid in the hedges and watched their schoolmates turn up at Jennifer’s, some dressed in their best, nearly all bearing gifts, as Jennifer grew more and more embarrassed on the doorstep, saying she didn’t know anything about a party. Since Jennifer’s family was well-to-do, all the kids had expected a big evening.
When the tunnel and dug-out, fireplaces and candle niches were all completed, Thea and Craig in their respective homes pretended belly-aches one day, and did not go to school. By prearrangement, they sneaked out and met at 11 a.m. with their bicycles. They went to the dug-out and jumped in unison on the tunnel top until it caved in. Then they broke the chimney tops, and scattered the carefully gathered firewood. They even found the potatoes and salt reserve, and flung that into the woods. Then they cycled home.
Two days later, on Thursday which was a school day, Craig was found at 5 p.m. behind some elm trees on the lawn of the Knobel house, stabbed to death through the throat and heart. He had ugly wounds also about the head, as if he had been hit repeatedly by rough stones. Measurements of the knife wounds showed that at least seven different knives had been used.
Ted was profoundly shocked. By then he had heard of the destroyed tunnel and fireplaces. Everyone knew that Thea and Craig had been absent from school on the Tuesday that the tunnel had been ruined. Everyone knew that Thea and Craig were constantly together. Ted feared for his daughter’s life. The police could not lay the blame for Craig’s death on any member of the gang, neither could they charge an entire group with murder or manslaughter. The inquiry was concluded with a warning to all parents of the children in the school.
‘Just because Craig and I were absent from school on the same day doesn’t mean that we went together to break up a stupid old tunnel,’ said Thea to a friend of her mother’s, a mother of one of the gang members. Thea could lie like an accomplished crook. It was difficult for an adult to challenge her.
So Thea’s gang age, such as it was, ended with Craig’s death. Then came boy friends and teasing, opportunities for intrigues and betrayals, and a constant stream, ever changing, of young men aged sixteen to twenty, some of whom lasted only five days with Thea.
We take leave of Thea as she sits primping, aged fifteen, in front of her looking-glass. She is especially happy this evening, because her nearest rival, a girl named Elizabeth, has just been in a car accident and had her nose and jaw broken, plus an eye damaged, so she will never look quite the same again. The summer is coming up, with all those dinner dances on terraces and swimming pool parties. There is even a rumour that Elizabeth may have to acquire a lower denture, so many of her teeth got broken, but the eye damage must be the most telling. Thea, however, will escape every catastrophe. There is a divinity that protects perfect little ladies like Thea.
THE END
