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.»
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
