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 split 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 worldly 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 (“Halfa 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
