Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
6
TRAWLER MARRIES FOURTH. I was on a subway somewhere in Brooklyn when I saw that headline. The paper that bannered it belonged to another passenger. The only part of the text that I could see read: Rutherfurd “Rusty” Trawler, the millionaire playboy often accused of pro-Nazi sympathies, eloped to Greenwich yesterday with a beautiful — Not that I wanted to read any more. Holly had married him: well, well. I wished I were under the wheels of the train. But I’d been wishing that before I spotted the headline. For a headful of reasons. I hadn’t seen Holly, not really, since our drunken Sunday at Joe Bell’s bar. The intervening weeks had given me my own case of the mean reds. First off, I’d been fired from my job: deservedly, and for an amusing misdemeanor too complicated to recount here. Also, my draft board was displaying an uncomfortable interest; and, having so recently escaped the regimentation of a small town, the idea of entering another form of disciplined life made me desperate. Between the uncertainty of my draft status and a lack of specific experience, I couldn’t seem to find another job. That was what I was doing on a subway in Brooklyn: returning from a discouraging interview with an editor of the now defunct newspaper, PM. All this, combined with the city heat of the summer, had reduced me to a state of nervous inertia. So I more than half meant it when I wished I were under the wheels of the train. The headline made the desire quite positive. If Holly could marry that “absurd foetus,” then the army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me. Or, and the question is apparent, was my outrage a little the result of being in love with Holly myself? A little. For I was in love with her. Just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.
When I reached my station I bought a paper; and, reading the tail-end of that sentence, discovered that Rusty’s bride was: a beautiful cover girl from the Arkansas hills, Miss Margaret Thatcher Fitzhue Wildwood. Mag! My legs went so limp with relief I took a taxi the rest of the way home.
Madame Sapphia Spanella met me in the hall, wild-eyed and wringing her hands. “Run,” she said. “Bring the police. She is killing somebody! Somebody is killing her!”
It sounded like it. As though tigers were loose in Holly’s apartment. A riot of crashing glass, of rippings and callings and overturned furniture. But there were no quarreling voices inside the uproar, which made it seem unnatural. “Run,” shrieked Madame Spanella, pushing me. “Tell the police murder!”
I ran; but only upstairs to Holly’s door. Pounding on it had one result: the racket subsided. Stopped altogether. But leading to let me in went unanswered, and my efforts to break down the door merely culminated in a bruised shoulder. Then below I heard Madame Spanella commanding some newcomer to go for the police. “Shut up,” she was told, “and get out of my way.”
It was José Ybarra-Jaegar. Looking not at all the smart Brazilian diplomat; but sweaty and frightened. He ordered me out of his way, too. And, using his own key, opened the door. “In here, Dr. Goldman,” he said, beckoning to a man accompanying him.
Since no one prevented me, I followed them into the apartment, which was tremendously wrecked. At last the Christmas tree had been dismantled, very literally: its brown dry branches sprawled in a welter of torn-up books, broken lamps and phonograph records. Even the icebox had been emptied, its contents tossed around the room: raw eggs were sliding down the walls and in the midst of the debris Holly’s no-name cat was calmly licking a puddle of milk.
In the bedroom, the smell of smashed perfume bottles made me gag. I stepped on Holly’s dark glasses; they were lying on the floor, the lenses already shattered, the frames cracked in half. Perhaps that is why Holly, a rigid figure on the bed, stared at José so blindly, seemed not to see the doctor, who, testing her pulse, crooned: “You’re a tired young lady. Very tired. You want to go to sleep, don’t you? Sleep.”
Holly rubbed her forehead, leaving a smear of blood from a cut finger. “Sleep,” she said, and whimpered like an exhausted, fretful child. “He’s the only one would ever let me. Let me hug him on cold nights. I saw a place in Mexico. With horses. By the sea.”
“With horses by the sea,” lullabied the doctor, selecting from his black case a hypodermic.
José averted his face, queasy at the sight of a needle. “Her sickness is only grief?” he asked, his difficult English lending the question an unintended irony. “She is grieving only?”
“Didn’t hurt a bit, now did it?” inquired the doctor, smugly dabbing Holly’s arm with a scrap of cotton.
She came to sufficiently to focus the doctor. “Everything hurts. Where are my glasses?” But she didn’t need them. Her eyes were closing of their own accord.
“She is only grieving?” insisted José.
“Please, sir,” the doctor was quite short with him, “if you will leave me alone with the patient.”
José withdrew to the front room, where he released his temper on the snooping, tiptoeing presence of Madame Spanella. “Don’t touch me! I’ll call the police,” she threatened as he whipped her to the door with Portuguese oaths.
He considered throwing me out, too; or so I surmised from his expression. Instead, he invited me to have a drink. The only unbroken bottle we could find contained dry vermouth. “I have a worry,” he confided. “I have a worry that this should cause scandal. Her crashing everything. Conducting like a crazy. I must have no public scandal. It is too delicate: my name, my work.”
He seemed cheered to learn that I saw no reason for a “scandal”; demolishing one’s own possessions was, presumably, a private affair.
“It is only a question of grieving,” he firmly declared. “When the sadness came, first she throws the drink she is drinking. The bottle. Those books. A lamp. Then I am scared. I hurry to bring a doctor.”
“But why?” I wanted to know. “Why should she have a fit over, Rusty? If I were her, I’d celebrate.”
“Rusty?”
I was still carrying my newspaper, and showed him the headline.
“Oh, that.” He grinned rather scornfully. “They do us a grand favor, Rusty and Mag. We laugh over it: how they think they break our hearts when all the time we want them to run away. I assure you, we were laughing when the sadness came.” His eyes searched the litter on the floor; he picked up a ball of yellow paper. “This,” he said.
It was a telegram from Tulip, Texas: Received notice young Fred killed in action overseas stop your husband and children join in the sorrow of our mutual loss stop letter follows love Doc. Holly never mentioned her brother again: except once. Moreover, she stopped calling me Fred. June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone. Her hair darkened, she put on weight. She became rather careless about her clothes: used to rush round to the delicatessen wearing a rain-slicker and nothing underneath. José moved into the apartment, his name replacing Mag Wildwood’s on the mailbox. Still, Holly was a good deal alone, for José stayed in Washington three days a week. During his absences she entertained no one and seldom left the apartment — except on Thursdays, when she made her weekly trip to Ossining.
Which is not to imply that she had lost interest in life; far from it, she seemed more content, altogether happier than I’d ever seen her. A keen sudden un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking resulted in several un-Holly-like purchases: at a Parke-Bernet auction she acquired a stag-at-bay hunting tapestry and, from the William Randolph Hearst estate, a gloomy pair of Gothic “easy” chairs; she bought the complete Modern Library, shelves of classical records, innumerable. Metropolitan Museum reproductions (including a statue of a Chinese cat that her own cat hated and hissed at and ultimately broke), a Waring mixer and a pressure cooker and a library of cook books. She spent whole hausfrau afternoons slopping about in the sweatbox of her midget kitchen: “José says I’m better than the Colony. Really, who would have dreamed I had such a great natural talent? A month ago I couldn’t scramble eggs.” And still couldn’t, for that matter. Simple dishes, steak, a proper salad, were beyond her. Instead, she fed José, and occasionally myself, outré soups (brandied black terrapin poured into avocado shells) Nero-ish novelties (roasted pheasant stuffed with pomegranates and persimmons) and other dubious innovations (chicken and saffron rice served with a chocolate sauce: “An East Indian classic, my dear.”) Wartime sugar and cream rationing restricted her imagination when it came to sweets — nevertheless, she once managed something called Tobacco Tapioca: best not describe it.
Nor describe her attempts to master Portuguese, an ordeal as tedious to me as it was to her, for whenever I visited her an album of Linguaphone records never ceased rotating on the phonograph. Now, too, she rarely spoke a sentence that did not begin, “After we’re married — ” or “When we move to Rio — ” Yet José had never suggested marriage. She admitted it. “But, after all, he knows I’m preggers. Well, I am, darling. Six weeks gone. I don’t see why that should surprise you. It didn’t me. Not un peu bit. I’m delighted. I want to have at least nine. I’m sure some of them will be rather dark — José has a touch of le nègre, I suppose you guessed that? Which is fine by me: what could be prettier than a quite coony baby with bright green beautiful eyes? I wish, please don’t laugh — but I wish I’d been a virgin for him, for José. Not that I’ve warmed the multitudes some people say: I don’t blame the bastards for saying it, I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line. Really, though, I toted up the other night, and I’ve only had eleven lovers — not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count. Eleven. Does that make me a whore? Look at Mag Wildwood. Or Honey Tucker. Or Rose Ellen Ward. They’ve had the old clap-yo’-hands so many times it amounts to applause. Of course I haven’t anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can’t bang the guy and cash his checks and at least not try to believe you love him. I never have. Even Benny Shacklett and all those rodents. I sort of hypnotized myself into thinking their sheer rattiness had a certain allure. Actually, except for Doc, if you want to count Doc, José is my first non-rat romance. Oh, he’s not my idea of the absolute finito. He tells little lies and he worries what people think and he takes about fifty baths a day: men ought to smell somewhat. He’s too prim, too cautious to be my guy ideal; he always turns his back to get undressed and he makes too much noise when he eats and I don’t like to see him run because there’s something funny-looking about him when he runs. If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn’t pick José. Nehru, he’s nearer the mark. Wendell Wilkie. I’d settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or — listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. Because I do love José — I’d stop smoking if he asked me to. He’s friendly, he can laugh me out of the mean reds, only I don’t have them much any more, except sometimes, and even then they’re not so hideola that I gulp Seconal or have to haul myself to Tiffany’s: I take his suit to the cleaner, or stuff some mushrooms, and I feel fine, just great. Another thing, I’ve thrown away my horoscopes. I must have spent a dollar on every goddamn star in the goddamn planetarium. It’s a bore, but the answer, is good things only happen to you if you’re good. Good? Honest is more what I mean. Not law-type honest — I’d rob a grave, I’d steal two-bits off a dead man’s eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day’s enjoyment — but unto-thyself-type honest. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn’t being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other’s sure to. Oh, screw it, cookie — hand me my guitar, and I’ll sing you a fada in the most perfect Portuguese.”
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments. Frequently, when he was out of town (I’d developed hostile attitudes toward him, and seldom used his name) we spent entire evenings together during which we exchanged less than a hundred words; once, we walked all the way to Chinatown, ate a chow-mein supper, bought some paper lanterns and stole a box of joss sticks, then moseyed across the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the bridge, as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, she said: “Years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazilian brats. Because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river — I love New York, even though it isn’t mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.” And I said: “Do shut up,” for I felt infuriatingly left out — a tugboat in drydock while she, glittery voyager of secure destination, steamed down the harbor with whistles whistling and confetti in the air. So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I’ve lived.
* * * * *
It happened to fall on the 30th of September, my birthday, a fact which had no effect on events, except that, expecting some form of monetary remembrance from my family, I was eager for the postman’s morning visit. Indeed, I went downstairs and waited for him. If I had not been loitering in the vestibule, then Holly would not have asked me to go horseback riding; and would not, consequently, have had the opportunity to save my life.
“Come on,” she said, when she found me awaiting the postman. “Let’s walk a couple of horses around the park.” She was wearing a windbreaker and a pair of blue jeans and tennis shoes; she slapped her stomach, drawing attention to its flatness: “Don’t think I’m out to lose the heir. But there’s a horse, my darling old Mabel Minerva — I can’t go without saying good-bye to Mabel Minerva.”
“Good-bye?”
“A week from Saturday. José bought the tickets.” In rather a trance, I let her lead me down to the street. “We change planes in Miami. Then over the sea. Over the Andes. Taxi!”
Over the Andes. As we rode in a cab across Central Park it seemed to me as though I, too, were flying, desolately floating over snow-peaked and perilous territory.
“But you can’t. After all, what about. Well, what about. Well, you can’t really run off and leave everybody.”
“I don’t think anyone will miss me. I have no friends.”
“I will. Miss you. So will Joe Bell. And oh — millions. Like Sally. Poor Mr. Tomato.”
“I loved old Sally,” she said, and sighed. “You know I haven’t been to see him in a month? When I told him I was going away, he was an angel. Actually” — she frowned — “he seemed delighted that I was leaving the country. He said it was all for the best. Because sooner or later there might be trouble. If they found out I wasn’t his real niece. That fat lawyer, O’Shaughnessy, O’Shaughnessy sent me five hundred dollars. In cash. A wedding present from Sally.”
I wanted to be unkind. “You can expect a present from me, too. When, and if, the wedding happens.”
She laughed. “He’ll marry me, all right. In church. And with his family there. That’s why we’re waiting till we get to Rio.”
“Does he know you’re married already?”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you trying to ruin the day? It’s a beautiful day: leave it alone!”
“But it’s perfectly possible — ”
“It isn’t possible. I’ve told you, that wasn’t legal. It couldn’t be.” She rubbed her nose, and glanced at me sideways. “Mention that to a living soul, darling. I’ll hang you by your toes and dress you for a hog.”
The stables — I believe they have been replaced by television studios — were on West Sixty-sixth street Holly selected for me an old sway-back black and white mare: “Don’t worry, she’s safer than a cradle.” Which, in my case, was a necessary guarantee, for ten-cent pony rides at childhood carnivals were the limit of my equestrian experience. Holly helped hoist me into the saddle, then mounted her own horse, a silvery animal that took the lead as we jogged across the traffic of Central Park West and entered a riding path dappled with leaves denuding breezes danced about.
“See?” she shouted. “It’s great!” And suddenly it was. Suddenly, watching the tangled colors of Holly’s hair flash in the red-yellow leaf light, I loved her enough to forget myself, my self-pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen. Very gently the horses began to trot, waves of wind splashed us, spanked our faces, we plunged in and out of sun and shadow pools, and joy, a glad-to-be-alive exhilaration, jolted through me like a jigger of nitrogen. That was one minute; the next introduced farce in grim disguise.
For all at once, like savage members of a jungle ambush, a band of Negro boys leapt out of the shrubbery along the path. Hooting, cursing, they launched rocks and thrashed at the horse’s rumps with switches.
Mine, the black and white mare, rose on her hind legs, whinnied, teetered like a tightrope artist, then blue-streaked down the path, bouncing my feet out of the stirrups and leaving me scarcely attached. Her hooves made the gravel stones spit sparks. The sky careened. Trees, a lake with little-boy sailboats, statues went by licketysplit. Nursemaids rushed to rescue their charges from our awesome approach; men, bums and others, yelled: “Pull in the reins!” and “Whoa, boy, whoa!” and “Jump!” It was only later that I remembered these voices; at the time I was simply conscious of Holly, the cowboy-sound of her racing behind me, never quite catching up, and over and over calling encouragements. Onward: across the park and out into Fifth Avenue: stampeding against the noonday traffic, taxis, buses that screechingly swerved. Past the Duke mansion, the Frick Museum, past the Pierre and the Plaza. But Holly gained ground; moreover, a mounted policeman had joined the chase: flanking my runaway mare, one on either side, their horses performed a pincer movement that brought her to a steamy halt. It was then, at last, that I fell off her back. Fell off and picked myself up and stood there, not altogether certain where I was. A crowd gathered. The policeman huffed and wrote in a book: presently he was most sympathetic, grinned and said he would arrange for our horses to be returned to their stable.
Holly put us in a taxi. “Darling. How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
“But you haven’t any pulse,” she said, feeling my wrist.
“Then I must be dead.”
“No, idiot. This is serious. Look at me.”
The trouble was, I couldn’t see her; rather, I saw several Holly’s, a trio of sweaty faces so white with concern that I was both touched and embarrassed. “Honestly. I don’t feel anything. Except ashamed.”
“Please. Are you sure? Tell me the truth. You might have been killed.”
“But I wasn’t. And thank you. For saving my life. You’re wonderful. Unique. I love you.”
“Damn fool.” She kissed me on the cheek. Then there were four of her, and I fainted dead away.
That evening, photographs of Holly were frontpaged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. The publicity had nothing to do with runaway horses. It concerned quite another matter, as the headlines revealed: PLAYGIRL ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS SCANDAL (Journal-American), ARREST DOPE-SMUGGLING ACTRESS (Daily News), DRUG RING EXPOSED, GLAMOUR GIRL HELD (Daily Mirror).
Of the lot, the News printed the most striking picture: Holly, entering police headquarters, wedged between two muscular detectives, one male, one female. In this squalid context even her clothes (she was still wearing her riding costume, windbreaker and blue jeans) suggested a gang-moll hooligan: an impression dark glasses, disarrayed coiffure and a Picayune cigarette dangling from sullen lips did not diminish. The caption read: Twenty-year-old Holly Golightly, beautiful movie starlet and cafe society celebrity D.A. alleges to be key figure in international drug-smuggling racket linked to racketeer Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. Dets. Patrick Connor and Sheilah Fezzonetti (L. and R.) are shown escorting her into 67th St. Precinct. See story on Pg. 3. The story, featuring a photograph of a man identified as Oliver “Father” O’Shaughnessy (shielding his face with a fedora), ran three full columns. Here, somewhat condensed, are the pertinent paragraphs: Members of café society were stunned today by the arrest of gorgeous Holly Golightly, twenty-year-old Hollywood starlet and highly publicized girl-about-New York. At the same time, 2 P.M., police nabbed Oliver O’Shaughnessy, 52, of the Hotel Seabord, W. 49th St., as he exited from a Hamburg Heaven on Madison Ave. Both are alleged by District Attorney Frank L. Donovan to be important figures in an international drug ring dominated by the notorious Mafia-führer Salvatore “Sally” Tomato, currently in Sing Sing serving a five-year rap for political bribery … O’Shaughnessy, a defrocked priest variously known in crimeland circles as “Father” and “The Padre,” has a history of arrests dating back to 1934, when he served two years for operating a phony Rhode Island mental institution, The Monastery. Miss Golightly, who has no previous criminal record, was arrested in her luxurious apartment at a swank East Side address … Although the D.A.’s office has issued no formal statement, responsible sources insist the blond and beautiful actress, not long ago the constant companion of multimillionaire Rutherfurd Trawler, has been acting as “liaison” between the imprisoned Tomato and his chief-lieutenant, O’Shaughnessy … Posing as a relative of Tomato’s, Miss Golightly is said to have paid weekly visits to Sing Sing, and on these occasions Tomato supplied her with verbally coded messages which she then transmitted to O’Shaughnessy. Via this link, Tomato, believed to have been born in Cefalu, Sicily, in 1874, was able to keep firsthand control of a world-wide narcotics syndicate with outposts in Mexico, Cuba, Sicily, Tangier, Tehran and Dakar. But the D.A.’s office refused to offer any detail on these allegations or even verify them … Tipped off, a large number of reporters were on hand at the E. 67th St. Precinct station when the accused pair arrived for booking. O’Shaughnessy, a burly red-haired man, refused comment and kicked one cameraman in the groin. But Miss Golightly, a fragile eyeful, even though attired like a tomboy in slacks and leather jacket, appeared relatively unconcerned. “Don’t ask me what the hell this is about,” she told reporters. “Parce-que Je ne sais pas, mes chères. (Because I do not know, my dears). Yes — I have visited Sally Tomato. I used to go to see him every week. What’s wrong with that? He believes in God, and so do I.” …
Then, under the subheading ADMITS OWN DRUG ADDICTION: Miss Golightly smiled when a reporter asked whether or not she herself is a narcotics user. “I’ve had a little go at marijuana. It’s not half so destructive as brandy. Cheaper, too. Unfortunately, I prefer brandy. No, Mr. Tomato never mentioned drugs to me. It makes me furious, the way these wretched people keep persecuting him. He’s a sensitive, a religious person. A darling old man.”
There is one especially gross error in this report: she was not arrested in her “luxurious apartment.” It took place in my own bathroom. I was soaking away my horse-ride pains in a tub of scalding water laced with Epsom salts; Holly, an attentive nurse, was sitting on the edge of the tub waiting to rub me with Sloan’s liniment and tuck me into bed. There was a knock at the front door. As the door was unlocked, Holly called Come in. In came Madame Sapphia Spanella, trailed by a pair of civilian-clothed detectives, one of them a lady with thick yellow braids roped round her head.
“Here she is: the wanted woman!” boomed Madame Spanella, invading the bathroom and leveling a finger, first at Holly’s, then my nakedness. “Look. What a whore she is.” The male detective seemed embarrassed: by Madame Spanella and by the situation; but a harsh enjoyment tensed the face of his companion — she plumped a hand on Holly’s shoulder and, in a surprising baby-child voice, said: “Come along, sister. You’re going places.” Whereupon Holly coolly told her: “Get them cotton-pickin’ hands off of me, you dreary, driveling old bull-dyke.” Which rather enraged the lady: she slapped Holly damned hard. So hard, her head twisted on her neck, and the bottle of linement, flung from her hand, smithereened on the tile floor — where I, scampering out of the tub to enrich the fray, stepped on it and all but severed both big toes. Nude and bleeding a path of bloody footprints, I followed the action as far as the hall. “Don’t forget,” Holly managed to instruct me as the detectives propelled her down the stairs, “please feed the cat.”
* * * * *
Of course I believed Madame Spanella to blame: she’d several times called the authorities to complain about Holly. It didn’t occur to me the affair could have dire dimensions until that evening when Joe Bell showed up flourishing the newspapers. He was too agitated to speak sensibly; he caroused the room hitting his fists together while I read the accounts.
Then he said: “You think it’s so? She was mixed up in this lousy business?”
“Well, yes.”
He popped a Tums in his mouth and, glaring at me, chewed it as though he were crunching my bones. “Boy, that’s rotten. And you meant to be her friend. What a bastard!”
“Just a minute. I didn’t say she was involved knowingly. She wasn’t. But there, she did do it. Carry messages and whatnot –”
He said: “Take it pretty calm, don’t you? Jesus, she could get ten years. More.” He yanked the papers away from me. “You know her friends. These rich fellows. Come down to the bar, we’ll start phoning. Our girl’s going to need fancier shysters than I can afford.”
I was too sore and shaky to dress myself; Joe Bell had to help. Back at his bar he propped me in the telephone booth with a triple martini and a brandy tumbler full of coins. But I couldn’t think who to contact. José was in Washington, and I had no notion where to reach him there. Rusty Trawler? Not that bastard! Only: what other friends of hers did I know? Perhaps she’d been right when she’d said she had none, not really.
I put through a call to Crestview 5-6958 in Beverly Hills, the number long-distance information gave me for O.J. Berman. The person who answered said Mr. Berman was having a massage and couldn’t be disturbed: sorry, try later. Joe Bell was incensed — told me I should have said it was a life and death matter; and he insisted on my trying Rusty. First, I spoke to Mr. Trawler’s butler — Mr. and Mrs. Trawler, he announced, were at dinner and might he take a message? Joe Bell shouted into the receiver: “This is urgent, mister. Life and death.” The outcome was that I found myself talking — listening, rather — to the former Mag Wildwood: “Are you starkers?” she demanded. “My husband and I will positively sue anyone who attempts to connect our names with that ro-ro-rovolting and de-de-degenerate girl. I always knew she was a hop-hop-head with no more morals than a hound-bitch in heat. Prison is where she belongs. And my husband agrees one thousand percent. We will positively sue anyone who — ” Hanging up, I remembered old Doc down in Tulip, Texas; but no, Holly wouldn’t like it if I called him, she’d kill me good.
I rang California again; the circuits were busy, stayed busy, and by the time O.J. Berman was on the line I’d emptied so many martinis he had to tell me why I was phoning him: “About the kid, is it? I know already. I spoke already to Iggy Fitelstein. Iggy’s the best shingle in New York. I said Iggy you take care of it, send me the bill, only keep my name anonymous, see. Well, I owe the kid something. Not that I owe her anything, you want to come down to it. She’s crazy. A phony. But a real phony, you know? Anyway, they only got her in ten thousand bail. Don’t worry, Iggy’ll spring her tonight — it wouldn’t surprise me she’s home already.”
* * * * *
But she wasn’t; nor had she returned the next morning when I went down to feed her cat. Having no key to the apartment, I used the fire escape and gained entrance through a window. The cat was in the bedroom, and he was not alone: a man was there, crouching over a suitcase. The two of us, each thinking the other a burglar, exchanged uncomfortable stares as I stepped through the window. He had a pretty face, lacquered hair, he resembled José; moreover, the suitcase he’d been packing contained the wardrobe José kept at Holly’s, the shoes and suits she fussed over, was always carting to menders and cleaners. And I said, certain it was so: “Did Mr. Ybarra-Jaegar send you?”
“I am the cousin,” he said with a wary grin and just-penetrable accent.
“Where is José?”
He repeated the question, as though translating it into another language. “Ah, where she is! She is wailing,” he said and, seeming to dismiss me, resumed his valet activities.
So: the diplomat was planning a powder. Well, I wasn’t amazed; or in the slightest sorry. Still, what a heartbreaking stunt: “He ought to be horse-whipped.”
The cousin giggled, I’m sure he understood me. He shut the suitcase and produced a letter. “My cousin, she ask me leave that for his chum. You will oblige?”
On the envelope was scribbled: For Miss H. Golightly — Courtesy Bearer.
I sat down on Holly’s bed, and hugged Holly’s cat to me, and felt as badly for Holly, every iota, as she could feel for herself.
“Yes, I will oblige.”
* * * * *
And I did: without the least wanting to. But I hadn’t the courage to destroy the letter; or the will power to keep it in my pocket when Holly very tentatively inquired if, if by any chance, I’d had news of José. It was two mornings later; I was sitting by her bedside in a room that reeked of iodine and bedpans, a hospital room. She had been there since the night of her arrest. “Well, darling,” she’d greeted me, as I tiptoed toward her carrying a carton of Picayune cigarettes and a wheel of new-autumn violets, “I lost the heir.” She looked not quite twelve years: her pale vanilla hair brushed back, her eyes, for once minus their dark glasses, clear as rain water — one couldn’t believe how ill she’d been.
Yet it was true: “Christ, I nearly cooled. No fooling, the fat woman almost had me. She was yakking up a storm. I guess I couldn’t have told you about the fat woman. Since I didn’t know about her myself until my brother died. Right away I was wondering where he’d gone, what it meant, Fred’s dying; and then I saw her, she was there in the room with me, and she had Fred cradled in her arms, a fat mean red bitch rocking in a rocking chair with Fred on her lap and laughing like a brass band. The mockery of it! But it’s all that’s ahead for us, my friend: this comedienne waiting to give you the old razz. Now do you see why I went crazy and broke everything?”
Except for the lawyer O.J. Berman had hired, I was the only visitor she had been allowed. Her room was shared by other patients, a trio of triplet-like ladies who, examining me with an interest not unkind but total, speculated in whispered Italian. Holly explained that: “They think you’re my downfall, darling. The fellow what done me wrong”; and, to a suggestion that she set them straight, replied: “I can’t. They don’t speak English. Anyway, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling their fun.” It was then that she asked about José.
The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. “Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.”
Guided by a compact mirror, she powdered, painted every vestige of twelve-year-old out of her face. She shaped her lips with one tube, colored her cheeks from another. She penciled the rims of her eyes, blued the lids, sprinkled her neck with 4711; attached pearls to her ears and donned her dark glasses; thus armored, and after a displeased appraisal of her manicure’s shabby condition, she ripped open the letter and let her eyes race through it while her stony small smile grew smaller and harder. Eventually she asked for a Picayune. Took a puff: “Tastes bum. But divine,” she said and, tossing me the letter: “Maybe this will come in handy — if you ever write a rat-romance. Don’t be hoggy: read it aloud. I’d like to hear it myself.”
It began: “My dearest little girl — ”
Holly at once interrupted. She wanted to know what I thought of the handwriting. I thought nothing: a tight, highly legible, uneccentric script. “It’s him to a T. Buttoned up and constipated,” she declared. “Go on.”
“My dearest little girl, I have loved you knowing you were not as others. But conceive of my despair upon discovering in such a brutal and public style how very different you are from the manner of woman a man of my faith and career could hope to make his wife. Verily I grief for the disgrace of your present circumstance, and do not find it in my heart to add my condemn to the condemn that surrounds you. So I hope you will find it in your heart not to condemn me. I have my family to protect, and my name, and I am a coward where those institutions enter. Forget me, beautiful child. I am no longer here. I am gone home. But may God always be with you and your child. May God be not the same as — José.”
“Well?”
“In a way it seems quite honest. And even touching.”
“Touching? That square-ball jazz!”
“But after all, he says he’s a coward; and from his point of view, you must see –”
Holly, however, did not want to admit that she saw; yet her face, despite its cosmetic disguise, confessed it. “All right, he’s not a rat without reason. A super-sized, King Kong-type rat like Rusty. Benny Shacklett. But oh gee, golly goddamn,” she said, jamming a fist into her mouth like a bawling baby, “I did love him. The rat
The Italian trio imagined a lover’s crise and, placing the blame for Holly’s groanings where they felt it belonged, tut-tutted their tongues at me. I was flattered: proud that anyone should think Holly cared for me. She quieted when I offered her another cigarette. She swallowed and said: “Bless you, Buster. And bless you for being such a bad jockey. If I hadn’t had to play Calamity Jane I’d still be looking forward to the grub in an unwed mama’s home. Strenuous exercise, that’s what did the trick. But I’ve scared la merde out of the whole badge-department by saying it was because Miss Dykeroo slapped me. Yessir, I can sue them on several counts, including false arrest.”
Until then, we’d skirted mention of her more sinister tribulations, and this jesting reference to them seemed appalling, pathetic, so definitely did it reveal how incapable she was of recognizing the bleak realities before her. “Now, Holly,” I said, thinking: be strong, mature, an uncle. “Now, Holly. We can’t treat it as a joke. We have to make plans.”
“You’re too young to be stuffy. Too small. By the way, what business is it of yours?”
“None. Except you’re my friend, and I’m worried. I mean to know what you intend doing.”
She rubbed her nose, and concentrated on the ceiling. “Today’s Wednesday, isn’t it? So I suppose I’ll sleep until Saturday, really get a good schluffen. Saturday morning I’ll skip out to the bank. Then I’ll stop by the apartment and pick up a nightgown or two and my Mainbocher. Following which, I’ll report to Idlewild. Where, as you damn well know, I have a perfectly fine reservation on a perfectly fine plane. And since you’re such a friend I’ll let you wave me off. Please stop shaking your head.”
“Holly. Holly. You can’t do that.”
“Et pourquoi pas? I’m not hot-footing after José, if that’s what you suppose. According to my census, he’s strictly a citizen of Limboville. It’s only: why should I waste a perfectly fine ticket? Already paid for? Besides, I’ve never been to Brazil.”
“Just what kind of pills have they been feeding you here? Can’t you realize, you’re under a criminal indictment. If they catch you jumping bail, they’ll throw away the key. Even if you get away with it, you’ll never be able to come home.”
“Well, so, tough titty. Anyway, home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.”
“No, Holly, it’s stupid. You’re innocent. You’ve got to stick it out.”
She said, “Rah, team, rah,” and blew smoke in my face. She was impressed, however; her eyes were dilated by unhappy visions, as were mine: iron rooms, steel corridors of gradually closing doors. “Oh, screw it,” she said, and stabbed out her cigarette. “I have a fair chance they won’t catch me. Provided you keep your bouche fermez. Look. Don’t despise me, darling.” She put her hand over mine and pressed it with sudden immense sincerity. “I haven’t much choice. I talked it over with the lawyer: oh, I didn’t tell him anything regarding Rio — he’d tip the badgers himself, rather than lose his fee, to say nothing of the nickels O.J. put up for bail. Bless O.J.’s heart; but once on the coast I helped him win more than ten thou in a single poker hand: we’re square. No, here’s the real shake: all the badgers want from me is a couple of free grabs and my services as a state’s witness against Sally — nobody has any intention of prosecuting me, they haven’t a ghost of a case. Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not. Not if they can prove he doped Sister Kenny. My yardstick is how somebody treats me, and old Sally, all right he wasn’t absolutely white with me, say he took a slight advantage, just the same Sally’s an okay shooter, and I’d let the fat woman snatch me sooner than help the law-boys pin him down.” Tilting her compact mirror above her face, smoothing her lipstick with a crooked pinkie, she said: “And to be honest, that isn’t all. Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion. Even if a jury gave me the Purple Heart, this neighborhood holds no future: they’d still have up every rope from LaRue to Perona’s Bar and Grill — take my word, I’d be about as welcome as Mr. Frank E. Campbell. And if you lived off my particular talents, Cookie, you’d understand the kind of bankruptcy I’m describing. Uh, uh, I don’t just fancy a fade-out that finds me belly-bumping around Roseland with a pack of West Side hillbillies. While the excellent Madame Trawler sashayes her twat in and out of Tiffany’s. I couldn’t take it. Give me the fat woman any day.”
A nurse, soft-shoeing into the room, advised that visiting hours were over. Holly started to complain, and was curtailed by having a thermometer popped in her mouth. But as I took leave, she unstoppered herself to say: “Do me a favor, darling. Call up the Times, or whatever you call, and get a list of the fifty richest men in Brazil. I’m not kidding. The fifty richest: regardless of race or color. Another favor — poke around my apartment till you find that medal you gave me. The St. Christopher. I’ll need it for the trip.”
* * * * *
The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though it seemed improbable a plane could penetrate it.
But Holly, ignoring my cheerful conviction that her flight would not go, continued her preparations — placing, I must say, the chief burden of them on me. For she had decided it would be unwise of her to come near the brownstone. Quite rightly, too: it was under surveillance, whether by police or reporters or other interested parties one couldn’t tell — simply a man, sometimes men, who hung around the stoop. So she’d gone from the hospital to a bank and straight then to Joe Bell’s Bar. “She don’t figure she was followed,” Joe Bell told me when he came with a message that Holly wanted me to meet her there as soon as possible, a half-hour at most, bringing: “Her jewelry. Her guitar. Toothbrushes and stuff. And a bottle of hundred-year-old brandy: she says you’ll find it hid down in the bottom of the dirty-clothes basket. Yeah, oh, and the cat. She wants the cat. But hell,” he said, “I don’t know we should help her at all. She ought to be protected against herself. Me, I feel like telling the cops. Maybe if I go back and build her some drinks, maybe I can get her drunk enough to call it off.”
Stumbling, skidding up and down the fire escape between Holly’s apartment and mine, wind-blown and winded and wet to the bone (clawed to the bone as well, for the cat had not looked favorably upon evacuation, especially in such inclement weather) I managed a fast, first-rate job of assembling her going-away belongings. I even found the St. Christopher’s medal. Everything was piled on the floor of my room, a poignant pyramid of brassières and dancing slippers and pretty things I packed in Holly’s only suitcase. There was a mass left over that I had to put in paper grocery bags. I couldn’t think how to carry the cat; until I thought of stuffing him in a pillowcase.
Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy’s Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. It was a light-hearted lark compared to the journey to Joe Bell’s bar. The guitar filled with rain, rain softened the paper sacks, the sacks spilt and perfume spilled on the pavement, pearls rolled in the gutter: while the wind pushed and the cat scratched, the cat screamed — but worse, I was frightened, a coward to equal José: those storming streets seemed aswarm with unseen presences waiting to trap, imprison me for aiding an outlaw.
The outlaw said: “You’re late, Buster. Did you bring the brandy?”
And the cat, released, leaped and perched on her shoulder: his tail swung like a baton conducting rhapsodic music. Holly, too, seemed inhabited by melody, some bouncy bon voyage oompahpah. Uncorking the brandy, she said: “This was meant to be part of my hope chest. The idea was, every anniversary we’d have a swig. Thank Jesus I never bought the chest. Mr. Bell, sir, three glasses.”
“You’ll only need two,” he told her. “I won’t drink to your foolishness.”
The more she cajoled him (“Ah, Mr. Bell. The lady doesn’t vanish every day. Won’t you toast her?”), the gruffer he was: “I’ll have no part of it. If you’re going to hell, you’ll go on your own. With no further help from me.” An inaccurate statement: because seconds after he’d made it a chauffeured limousine drew up outside the bar, and Holly, the first to notice it, put down her brandy, arched her eyebrows, as though she expected to see the District Attorney himself alight. So did I. And when I saw Joe Bell blush, I had to think: by God, he did call the police. But then, with burning ears, he announced: “It’s nothing. One of them Carey Cadillacs. I hired it. To take you to the airport.”
He turned his back on us to fiddle with one of his flower arrangements. Holly said: “Kind, dear Mr. Bell. Look at me, sir.”
* * * * *
He wouldn’t. He wrenched the flowers from the vase and thrust them at her; they missed their mark, scattered on the floor. “Good-bye,” he said; and, as though he were going to vomit, scurried to the men’s room. We heard the door lock.
The Carey chauffeur was a worldy specimen who accepted our slapdash luggage most civilly and remained rock-faced when, as the limousine swished uptown through a lessening rain, Holly stripped off her clothes, the riding costume she’d never had a chance to substitute, and struggled into a slim black dress. We didn’t talk: talk could have only led to argument; and also, Holly seemed too preoccupied for conversation. She hummed to herself, swigged brandy, she leaned constantly forward to peer out the windows, as if she were hunting an address — or, I decided, taking a last impression of a scene she wanted to remember. It was neither of these. But this: “Stop here,” she ordered the driver, and we pulled to the curb of a street in Spanish Harlem. A savage, a garish, a moody neighborhood garlanded with poster-portraits of movie stars and Madonnas. Sidewalk litterings of fruit-rind and rotted newspaper were hurled about by the wind, for the wind still boomed, though the rain had hushed and there were bursts of blue in the sky.
Holly stepped out of the car; she took the cat with her. Cradling him, she scratched his head and asked. “What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for a tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram,” she said, dropping him; and when he did not move away, instead raised his thug-face and questioned her with yellowish pirate-eyes, she stamped her foot: “I said beat it!” He rubbed against her leg. “I said fuck off!” she shouted, then jumped back in the car, slammed the door, and: “Go,” she told the driver. “Go. Go.”
I was stunned. “Well, you are. You are a bitch.”
We’d traveled a block before she replied. “I told you. We just met by the river one day: that’s all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never — ” she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her.
But the cat was not at the corner where he’d been left. There was no one, nothing on the street except a urinating drunk and two Negro nuns herding a file of sweet-singing children. Other children emerged from doorways and ladies leaned over their window sills to watch as Holly darted up and down the block, ran back and forth chanting: “You. Cat. Where are you? Here, cat.” She kept it up until a bumpy-skinned boy came forward dangling an old tom by the scruff of its neck: “You wants a nice kitty, miss? Gimme a dollar.”
The limousine had followed us. Now Holly let me steer her toward it. At the door, she hesitated; she looked past me, past the boy still offering his cat (“Haifa dollar. Two-bits, maybe? Two-bits, it ain’t much”), and she shuddered, she had to grip my arm to stand up: “Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine.”
Then I made her a promise, I said I’d come back and find her cat: “I’ll take care of him, too. I promise.”
She smiled: that cheerless new pinch of a smile. “But what about me?” she said, whispered, and shivered again. “I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away. The mean reds, they’re nothing. The fat woman, she nothing. This, though: my mouth’s so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn’t spit.” She stepped in the car, sank in the seat. “Sorry, driver. Let’s go.”
* * * * *
TOMATO’S TOMATO MISSING. And: DRUG-CASE ACTRESS BELIEVED GANGLAND VICTIM. In due time, however, the press reported: FLEEING PLAYGIRL TRACED TO RIO. Apparently no attempt was made by American authorities to recover her, and soon the matter diminished to an occasional gossip-column mention; as a news story, it was revived only once: on Christmas Day, when Sally Tomato died of a heart attack at Sing Sing. Months went by, a winter of them, and not a word from Holly. The owner of the brownstone sold her abandoned possessions, the white-satin bed, the tapestry, her precious Gothic chair; a new tenant acquired the apartment, his name was Quaintance Smith, and he entertained as many gentlemen callers of a noisy nature as Holly ever had — though in this instance Madame Spanella did not object, indeed she doted on the young man and supplied filet mignon whenever he had a black eye. But in the spring a postcard came: it was scribbled in pencil, and signed with a lipstick kiss: Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany’s, but almost. Am joined at the hip with duhvine $enor. Love? Think so. Anyhoo am looking for somewhere to live ($enor has wife, 7 brats) and will let you know address when I know it myself. Mille tendresse. But the address, if it ever existed, never was sent, which made me sad, there was so much I wanted to write her: that I’d sold two stories, had read where the Trawlers were countersuing for divorce, was moving out of the brownstone because it was haunted. But mostly, I wanted to tell her about her cat. I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms — flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.