5

I went straight upstairs, got the bird cage, took it down and left it in front of her door. That settled that. Or so I imagined until the next morning when, as I was leaving for work, I saw the cage perched on a sidewalk ash-can waiting for the garbage collector. Rather sheepishly, I rescued it and carried it back to my room, a capitulation that did not lessen my resolve to put Holly Golightly absolutely out of my life. She was, I decided, “a crude exhibitionist,” “a time waster,” “an utter fake”: someone never to be spoken to again.

And I didn’t. Not for a long while. We passed each other on the stairs with lowered eyes. If she walked into Joe Bell’s, I walked out. At one point, Madame Sapphia Spanella, the coloratura and roller-skating enthusiast who lived on the first floor, circulated a petition among the brownstone’s other tenants asking them to join her in having Miss Golightly evicted: she was, said Madame Spanella, “morally objectionable” and the “perpetrator of all-night gatherings that endangered the safety and sanity of her neighbors.” Though I refused to sign, secretly I felt Madame Spanella had cause to complain. But her petition failed, and as April approached May, the open-windowed, warm spring nights were lurid with the party sounds, the loud-playing phonograph and martini laughter that emanated from Apt. 2.

It was no novelty to encounter suspicious specimens among Holly’s callers, quite the contrary; but one day late that spring, while passing through the brownstone’s vestibule, I noticed a very provocative man examining her mailbox. A person in his early fifties with a hard, weathered face, gray forlorn eyes. He wore an old sweat-stained gray hat, and his cheap summer suit, a pale blue, hung too loosely on his lanky frame; his shoes were brown and brandnew. He seemed to have no intention of ringing Holly’s bell. Slowly, as though he were reading Braille, he kept rubbing a finger across the embossed lettering of her name.

That evening, on my way to supper, I saw the man again. He was standing across the street, leaning against a tree and staring up at Holly’s windows. Sinister speculations rushed through my head. Was he a detective? Or some underworld agent connected with her Sing Sing friend, Sally Tomato? The situation revived my tenderer feelings for Holly; it was only fair to interrupt our feud long enough to warn her that she was being watched. As I walked to the corner, heading east toward the Hamburg Heaven at Seventy-ninth and Madison, I could feel the man’s attention focused on me. Presently, without turning my head, I knew that he was following me. Because I could hear him whistling. Not any ordinary tune, but the plaintive, prairie melody Holly sometimes played on her guitar: Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky. The whistling continued across Park Avenue and up Madison. Once, while waiting for a traffic light to change, I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he stooped to pet a sleazy Pomeranian. “That’s a fine animal you got there,” he told the owner in a hoarse, countrified drawl.

Hamburg Heaven was empty. Nevertheless, he took a seat right beside me at the long counter. He smelled of tobacco and sweat. He ordered a cup of coffee, but when it came he didn’t touch it. Instead, he chewed on a toothpick and studied me in the wall mirror facing us.

“Excuse me,” I said, speaking to him via the mirror, “but what do you want?”

The question didn’t embarrass him; he seemed relieved to have had it asked. “Son,” he said, “I need a friend.”

He brought out a wallet. It was as worn as his leathery hands, almost falling to pieces; and so was the brittle, cracked, blurred snapshot he handed me. There were seven people in the picture, all grouped together on the sagging porch of a stark wooden house, and all children, except for the man himself, who had his arm around the waist of a plump blond little girl with a hand shading her eyes against the sun.

“That’s me,” he said, pointing at himself. “That’s her . . .” he tapped the plump girl. “And this one over here,” he added, indicating a tow-headed beanpole, “that’s her brother, Fred.”

I looked at “her” again: and yes, now I can see it, an embryonic resemblance to Holly in the squinting, fat-cheeked child. At the same moment, I realized who the man must be.

“You’re Holly’s father.”

He blinked, he frowned. “Her name’s not Holly. She was a Lulamae Barnes. Was,” he said, shifting the toothpick in his mouth, “till she married me. I’m her husband. Doc Golightly. I’m a horse doctor, animal man. Do some farming, too. Near Tulip, Texas. Son, why are you laughin’?”

It wasn’t real laughter: it was nerves. I took a swallow of water and choked; he pounded me on the back. “This here’s no humorous matter, son. I’m a tired man. I’ve been five years lookin’ for my woman. Soon as I got that letter from Fred, saying where she was, I bought myself a ticket on the Greyhound. Lulamae belongs home with her husband and her churren.”

“Children?”

“Them’s her churren,” he said, almost shouted. He meant the four other young faces in the picture, two bare-footed girls and a pair of overalled boys. Well, of course: the man was deranged. “But Holly can’t be the mother of those children. They’re older than she is. Bigger.”

“Now, son,” he said in a reasoning voice, “I didn’t claim they was her natural-born churren. Their own precious mother, precious woman, Jesus rest her soul, she passed away July 4th, Independence Day, 1936. The year of the drought. When I married Lulamae, that was in December, 1938, she was going on fourteen. Maybe an ordinary person, being only fourteen, wouldn’t know their right mind. But you take Lulamae, she was an exceptional woman. She knew good-and-well what she was doing when she promised to be my wife and the mother of my churren. She plain broke our hearts when she ran off like she done.” He sipped his cold coffee, and glanced at me with a searching earnestness. “Now, son, do you doubt me? Do you believe what I’m saying is so?”

I did. It was too implausible not to be fact; moreover, it dovetailed with O.J. Berman’s description of the Holly he’d first encountered in California: “You don’t know whether she’s a hillbilly or an Okie or what.” Berman couldn’t be blamed for not guessing that she was a child-wife from Tulip, Texas.

“Plain broke our hearts when she ran off like she done,” the horse doctor repeated. “She had no cause. All the housework was done by her daughters. Lulamae could just take it easy: fuss in front of mirrors and wash her hair. Our own cows, our own garden, chickens, pigs: son, that woman got positively fat. While her brother growed into a giant. Which is a sight different from how they come to us. ‘Twas Nellie, my oldest girl, ’twas Nellie brought ’em into the house. She come to me one morning, and said: ‘Papa, I got two wild yunguns locked in the kitchen. I caught ’em outside stealing milk and turkey eggs.’ That was Lulamae and Fred. Well, you never saw a more pitiful something. Ribs sticking out everywhere, legs so puny they can’t hardly stand, teeth wobbling so bad they can’t chew mush. Story was: their mother died of the TB, and their papa done the same — and all the churren, a whole raft of ’em, they been sent off to live with different mean people. Now Lulamae and her brother, them two been living with some mean, no-count people a hundred miles east of Tulip. She had good cause to run off from that house. She didn’t have none to leave mine. Twas her home.” He leaned his elbows on the counter and, pressing his closed eyes with his fingertips, sighed. “She plumped out to be a real pretty woman. Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio. First thing you know, I’m out picking flowers. I tamed her a crow and taught it to say her name. I showed her how to play the guitar. Just to look at her made the tears spring to my eyes. The night I proposed, I cried like a baby. She said: ‘What you want to cry for, Doc? ‘Course we’ll be married. I’ve never been married before.’ Well, I had to laugh, hug and squeeze her: never been married before!” He chuckled, chewed on his toothpick a moment. “Don’t tell me that woman wasn’t happy!” he said, challengingly. “We all doted on her. She didn’t have to lift a finger, ‘cept to eat a piece of pie. ‘Cept to comb her hair and send away for all the magazines. We must’ve had a hunnerd dollars’ worth of magazines come into that house. Ask me, that’s what done it. Looking at show-off pictures. Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.” He put his hands over his eyes again; his breathing made a ragged noise. “The crow I give her went wild and flew away. All summer you could hear him. In the yard. In the garden. In the woods. All summer that damned bird was calling: Lulamae, Lulamae.”

He stayed hunched over and silent, as though listening to the long-ago summer sound. I carried our checks to the cashier. While I was paying, he joined me. We left together and walked over to Park Avenue. It was a cool, blowy evening; swanky awnings flapped in the breeze. The quietness between us continued until I said: “But what about her brother? He didn’t leave?”

“No, sir,” he said, clearing his throat. “Fred was with us right till they took him in the Army. A fine boy. Fine with horses. He didn’t know what got into Lulamae, how come she left her brother and husband and churren. After he was in the Army, though, Fred started hearing from her. The other day he wrote me her address. So I come to get her. I know he’s sorry for what she done. I know she wants to go home.” He seemed to be asking me to agree with him. I told him that I thought he’d find Holly, or Lulamae, somewhat changed. “Listen, son,” he said, as we reached the steps of the brownstone, “I advised you I need a friend. Because I don’t want to surprise her. Scare her none. That’s why I’ve held off. Be my friend: let her know I’m here.”

The notion of introducing Mrs. Golightly to her husband had its satisfying aspects; and, glancing up at her lighted windows, I hoped her friends were there, for the prospect of watching the Texan shake hands with Mag and Rusty and José was more satisfying still. But Doc Golightly’s proud earnest eyes and sweat-stained hat made me ashamed of such anticipations. He followed me into the house and prepared to wait at the bottom of the stairs. “Do I look nice?” he whispered, brushing his sleeves, tightening the knot of his tie.

Holly was alone. She answered the door at once; in fact, she was on her way out — white satin dancing pumps and quantities of perfume announced gala intentions. “Well, idiot,” she said, and playfully slapped me with her purse. “I’m in too much of a hurry to make up now. We’ll smoke the pipe tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure, Lulamae. If you’re still around tomorrow.”

She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle. “He told you that,” she said in a small, shivering voice.

“Oh, please. Where is he?” She ran past me into the hall. “Fred!” she called down the stairs. “Fred! Where are you, darling?”

I could hear Doc Golightly’s footsteps climbing the stairs. His head appeared above the banisters, and Holly backed away from him, not as though she were frightened, but as though she were retreating into a shell of disappointment. Then he was standing in front of her, hangdog and shy. “Gosh, Lulamae,” he began, and hesitated, for Holly was gazing at him vacantly, as though she couldn’t place him. “Gee, honey,” he said, “don’t they feed you up here? You’re so skinny. Like when I first saw you. All wild around the eye.”

Holly touched his face; her fingers tested the reality of his chin, his beard stubble. “Hello, Doc,” she said gently, and kissed him on the cheek. “Hello, Doc,” she repeated happily, as he lifted her off her feet in a rib-crushing grip. Whoops of relieved laughter shook him. “Gosh, Lulamae. Kingdom come.”

Neither of them noticed me when I squeezed past them and went up to my room. Nor did they seem aware of Madame Sapphia Spanella, who opened her door and yelled: “Shut up! It’s a disgrace. Do your whoring elsewhere.”

*  *  *  *  *

“Divorce him? Of course I never divorced him. I was only fourteen, for God’s sake. It couldn’t have been legal.” Holly tapped an empty martini glass. “Two more, my darling Mr. Bell.”

Joe Bell, in whose bar we were sitting, accepted the order reluctantly. “You’re rockin’ the boat kinda early,” he complained, crunching on a Tums. It was not yet noon, according to the black mahogany clock behind the bar, and he’d already served us three rounds.

“But it’s Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays. Besides, I haven’t been to bed yet,” she told him, and confided to me: “Not to sleep.” She blushed, and glanced away guiltily. For the first time since I’d known her, she seemed to feel a need to justify herself: “Well, I had to. Doc really loves me, you know. And I love him. He may have looked old and tacky to you. But you don’t know the sweetness of him, the confidence he can give to birds and brats and fragile things like that. Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot. I’ve always remembered Doc in my prayers. Please stop smirking!” she demanded, stabbing out a cigarette. “I do say my prayers.”

“I’m not smirking. I’m smiling. You’re the most amazing person.”

“I suppose I am,” she said, and her face, wan, rather bruised-looking in the morning light, brightened; she smoothed her tousled hair, and the colors of it glimmered like a shampoo advertisement. “I must look fierce. But who wouldn’t? We spent the rest of the night roaming around in a bus station. Right up till the last minute Doc thought I was going to go with him. Even though I kept telling him: But, Doc, I’m not fourteen any more, and I’m not Lulamae. But the terrible part is (and I realized it while we were standing there) I am. I’m still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds.”

Joe Bell disdainfully settled the fresh martinis in front of us.

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,” Holly advised him. “That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”

“She’s drunk,” Joe Bell informed me.

“Moderately,” Holly confessed. “But Doc knew what I meant. I explained it to him very carefully, and it was something he could understand. We shook hands and held on to each other and he wished me luck.” She glanced at the clock. “He must be in the Blue Mountains by now.”

“What’s she talkin’ about?” Joe Bell asked me.

Holly lifted her martini. “Let’s wish the Doc luck, too,” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc — it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”