The window was turning blue. A sunrise breeze bandied the curtains.
“What is today?”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday.” She stood up. “My God,” she said, and sat down again with a moan. “It’s too gruesome.”
I was tired enough not to be curious. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Still it was irresistible: “What’s gruesome about Thursday?”
“Nothing. Except that I can never remember when it’s coming. You see, on Thursdays I have to catch the eight forty-five. They’re so particular about visiting hours, so if you’re there by ten that gives you an hour before the poor men eat lunch. Think of it, lunch at eleven. You can go at two, and I’d so much rather, but he likes me to come in the morning, he says it sets him up for the rest of the day. I’ve got to stay awake,” she said, pinching her cheeks until the roses came, “there isn’t time to sleep, I’d look consumptive, I’d sag like a tenement, and that wouldn’t be fair: a girl can’t go to Sing Sing with a green face.”
“I suppose not.” The anger I felt at her over my story was ebbing; she absorbed me again.
“All the visitors do make an effort to look their best, and it’s very tender, it’s sweet as hell, the way the women wear their prettiest everything, I mean the old ones and the really poor ones too, they make the dearest effort to look nice and smell nice too, and I love them for it. I love the kids too, especially the colored ones. I mean the kids the wives bring. It should be sad, seeing the kids there, but it isn’t, they have ribbons in their hair and lots of shine on their shoes, you’d think there was going to be ice cream; and sometimes that’s what it’s like in the visitors’ room, a party. Anyway it’s not like the movies: you know, grim whisperings through a grille. There isn’t any grille, just a counter between you and them, and the kids can stand on it to be hugged; all you have to do to kiss somebody is lean across. What I like most, they’re so happy to see each other, they’ve saved up so much to talk about, it isn’t possible to be dull, they keep laughing and holding hands. It’s different afterwards,” she said. “I see them on the train. They sit so quiet watching the river go by.” She stretched a strand of hair to the corner of her mouth and nibbled it thoughtfully. “I’m keeping you awake. Go to sleep.”
“Please. I’m interested.”
“I know you are. That’s why I want you to go to sleep. Because if I keep on, I’ll tell you about Sally. I’m not sure that would be quite cricket.” She chewed her hair silently. “They never told me not to tell anyone. In so many words. And it is funny. Maybe you could put it in a story with different names and whatnot. Listen, Fred,” she said, reaching for another apple, “you’ve got to cross your heart and kiss your elbow—”
Perhaps contortionists can kiss their elbow; she had to accept an approximation.
“Well,” she said, with a mouthful of apple, “you may have read about him in the papers. His name is Sally Tomato, and I speak Yiddish better than he speaks English; but he’s a darling old man, terribly pious. He’d look like a monk if it weren’t for the gold teeth; he says he prays for me every night. Of course he was never my lover; as far as that goes, I never knew him until he was already in jail. But I adore him now, after all I’ve been going to see him every Thursday for seven months, and I think I’d go even if he didn’t pay me. This one’s mushy,” she said, and aimed the rest of the apple out the window. “By the way, I did know Sally by sight. He used to come to Joe Bell’s bar, the one around the corner: never talked to anybody, just stand there, like the kind of man who lives in hotel rooms. But it’s funny to remember back and realize how closely he must have been watching me, because right after they sent him up (Joe Bell showed me his picture in the paper. Blackhand. Mafia. All that mumbo jumbo: but they gave him five years) along came this telegram from a lawyer. It said to contact him immediately for information to my advantage.”
“You thought somebody had left you a million?”
“Not at all. I figured Bergdorf was trying to collect. But I took the gamble and went to see this lawyer (if he is a lawyer, which I doubt, since he doesn’t seem to have an office, just an answering service, and he always wants to meet you in Hamburg Heaven: that’s because he’s fat, he can eat ten hamburgers and two bowls of relish and a whole lemon meringue pie). He asked me how I’d like to cheer up a lonely old man, at the same time pick up a hundred a week. I told him look, darling, you’ve got the wrong Miss Golightly, I’m not a nurse that does tricks on the side. I wasn’t impressed by the honorarium either; you can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girl’s john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that’s another fifty. But then he told me his client was Sally Tomato. He said dear old Sally had long admired me à la distance, so wouldn’t it be a good deed if I went to visit him once a week. Well, I couldn’t say no: it was too romantic.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound right.”
She smiled. “You think I’m lying?”
“For one thing, they can’t simply let anyone visit a prisoner.”
“Oh, they don’t. In fact they make quite a boring fuss. I’m supposed to be his niece.”
“And it’s as simple as that? For an hour’s conversation he gives you a hundred dollars?”
“He doesn’t, the lawyer does. Mr. O’Shaughnessy mails it to me in cash as soon as I leave the weather report.”
“I think you could get into a lot of trouble,” I said, and switched off a lamp; there was no need of it now, morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.
“How?” she said seriously.
“There must be something in the law books about false identity. After all, you’re not his niece. And what about this weather report?”
She patted a yawn. “But it’s nothing. Just messages I leave with the answering service so Mr. O’Shaughnessy will know for sure that I’ve been up there. Sally tells me what to say, things like, oh, ‘there’s a hurricane in Cuba’ and ‘it’s snowing in Palermo.’ Don’t worry, darling,” she said, moving to the bed, “I’ve taken care of myself a long time.” The morning light seemed refracted through her: as she pulled the bed covers up to my chin she gleamed like a transparent child; then she lay down beside me. “Do you mind? I only want to rest a moment. So let’s don’t say another word. Go to sleep.”
I pretended to, I made my breathing heavy and regular. Bells in the tower of the next-door church rang the half-hour, the hour. It was six when she put her hand on my arm, a fragile touch careful not to waken. “Poor Fred,” she whispered, and it seemed she was speaking to me, but she was not. “Where are you, Fred? Because it’s cold. There’s snow in the wind.” Her cheek came to rest against my shoulder, a warm damp weight.
“Why are you crying?”
She sprang back, sat up. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, starting for the window and the fire escape, “I hate snoops.”
THE NEXT DAY, FRIDAY, I came home to find outside my door a grand-luxe Charles & Co. basket with her card: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling: and scribbled on the back in a freakishly awkward, kindergarten hand: Bless you darling Fred. Please forgive the other night. You were an angel about the whole thing. Mille tendresse—Holly. P.S. I won’t bother you again. I replied, Please do, and left this note at her door with what I could afford, a bunch of street-vendor violets. But apparently she’d meant what she said; I neither saw nor heard from her, and I gathered she’d gone so far as to obtain a downstairs key. At any rate she no longer rang my bell. I missed that; and as the days merged I began to feel toward her certain far-fetched resentments, as if I were being neglected by my closest friend. A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet. By Wednesday thoughts of Holly, of Sing Sing and Sally Tomato, of worlds where men forked over fifty dollars for the powder room, were so constant that I couldn’t work. That night I left a message in her mailbox: Tomorrow is Thursday. The next morning rewarded me with
