فصل 06

CHAPTER SIX

A Visitor from Holly’s Past

It wasn’t unusual for strange people to come to Holly’s door. One day late that spring, when I walked into the building, I saw a very strange man. He was looking at her mailbox.

He was about fifty years old, with a tired face and sad gray eyes. He wore an old gray hat and his cheap summer suit was too big for him. His shoes were brown and new. He didn’t ring Holly’s doorbell. Slowly, he touched the letters of her name on her card.

That evening, on my way to supper, I saw the man again. He was standing across the street, under a tree, looking up at Holly’s windows. What did he want? Was he a detective? Or someone sent by her Sing Sing friend, Sally Tomato?

Suddenly I felt sorry for Holly. We were enemies but I wanted to help her. As I walked to the corner, the man looked at me. Then he started to follow me. He was singing quietly - Holly’s song: “I don’t want to sleep, I don’t want to die. I just want to travel through the sky.”

I waited for a traffic light to change. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye as he spoke to a dog-owner. “You have a fine animal,” he said. His voice was low and he came from the hill-country.

The hamburger restaurant was empty but he sat next to me at the bar. He smelled of cigarettes. He ordered a cup of coffee but didn’t drink it. He looked at me in the mirror on the wall opposite us.

“Excuse me,” I said. I looked at him in the mirror, too. “What do you want?” The question didn’t make him nervous. “I need a friend,” he said.

He pulled an old wallet from his pocket and took out a photo. There were seven people in the picture, in front of a wooden house. They were all children, except for the man. He had his arm around the waist of a pretty little girl.

“That’s me,” he said, pointing at himself. “That’s her…” He pointed at the girl. “And this one here,” he added, “is her brother, Fred.”

I looked at “her” again. Yes, now I could see that the child was Holly.

“You’re Holly’s father!’

“Her name isn’t Holly,” he said. “She was Lulamae Barnes until she married me. I’m her husband, Doc Golightly. Call me Doc. I’m a horse doctor. I do some farming, too, near Tulip, in Texas. Why are you laughing?”

I wasn’t really laughing. I was nervous. I drank some water and it went down the wrong way. He hit me on the back. “This isn’t funny. I’m a tired man. I’ve looked for my woman for five years. Then I got Fred’s letter. ‘She’s in New York,’ he wrote. I bought a bus ticket and came to the city. I want Lulamae at home, with her husband and her children.”

“Children?”

“Those are her children,” he almost shouted. He pointed at the four other young faces in the picture - two girls and two boys.

Of course, the man was crazy. “Holly can’t be their mother. Those children are older and bigger than she is.”

“Listen,” he said calmly. “I’m not saying they’re her natural children. Their own dear mother, a good woman, died on the fourth of July, 1936. I married Lulamae in December, 1938, when she was almost fourteen years old. Maybe an ordinary person of fourteen doesn’t know what she wants. But Lulamae isn’t an ordinary person. ‘I know what I want,’ she said to me. ‘I want to be your wife and the mother of your children.’ She broke our hearts when she ran away.”

He drank his cold coffee and looked at me carefully. “Do you believe me?” Yes, I believed him. His story was so strange, it had to be true. And it was like O.J. Berman’s description of Holly in her first days in California.

“She broke our hearts when she ran away,” the horse doctor repeated. “She had no reason to go. Her daughters did all the housework. We had our own farm, chickens and pigs. She got fat and her brother grew really tall. They didn’t come to us like that. Nellie, my oldest girl, brought them into the house. She came to me one morning. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘I’ve locked two wild children in the kitchen. They were outside stealing milk and eggs.’ That was Lulamae and Fred. They were very thin and their teeth were falling out. Their mother and their father got sick and died. All the children were sent to live with different people. Lulamae and her brother lived with some terrible people, a hundred miles east of Tulip. She had a good reason to run away from their house. But she didn’t have a reason to leave my house. It was her home.”

He put his hands over his eyes. “She grew into a really pretty woman. She was fun, too. She talked a lot. She had an opinion about everything. I picked flowers for her. I found a bird for her and taught it to say her name. I taught her to play the guitar. One night I asked her to marry me. I was crying. ‘Why are you crying, Doc?’ she asked me. ‘Of course I’ll marry you. I’ve never been married before.’ I had to laugh. I’ve never been married before.”

He laughed quietly. “That woman was happy!” he said. “We all loved her. She didn’t do anything except eat and wash her hair. And send away for magazines. We spent a hundred dollars on magazines. That was the problem. She read those magazines and they gave her dreams about a different life. Then she started walking down the road from the farm. Every day she walked a little more. First she walked a mile and came home. Then she went two miles and came home. One day she didn’t stop walking.”

He put his hands over his eyes again. “The bird went wild and flew away. All summer you could hear him. In the yard. In the woods. All summer that bird was calling: ‘Lulamae, Lulamae.’”

Then he stopped talking. I paid our checks and we left the cafe together.

It was a cold, windy evening. We were both quiet. Then I said, “But what happened to her brother? Didn’t he leave?”

“No, sir,” he said. “Fred stayed with us until he became a soldier. He’s a good boy, good with horses. He didn’t understand Lulamae. ‘Why has she left her brother and husband and children?’ he asked. After he left the farm, he had some letters from her. He sent me her address. So I’ve come to get her. I know she’s sorry. I know she wants to go home.”

He wanted me to agree with him.

“I think you’ll find that Holly or Lulamae - has changed,” I said.

“Listen,” he said, when we reached my apartment building. “I need a friend. I don’t want to surprise her or scare her. Be my friend. Tell her I’m here.”

I liked the idea of introducing Mrs. Golightly to her husband. I looked up at her lighted windows. I hoped her friends were there. I wanted to see Doc Golightly shake hands with Mag and Rusty and Jose. But then I looked at Doc Golightly’s proud, serious eyes and I felt bad.

He followed me into the house and waited at the bottom of the stairs. “Do I look nice?” he asked quietly.

Holly was alone. She answered the door immediately. She was ready to go out. “Hello, you silly man,” she said. She hit my arm playfully with her purse. “I’m in a hurry so we can’t make friends now. Tomorrow, OK?”

“OK, Lulamae. But will you be here tomorrow?”

She took off her dark glasses and looked closely at me. “He told you that,” she said in a small, nervous 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 heard Doc Golightly climbing the stairs. Holly saw him and stopped. She wasn’t scared but suddenly she was very sad. Then he was standing shyly in front of her.

“Hello, Lulamae,” he began. “Don’t they feed you up here? You’re so thin - like when I first saw you.”

Holly touched his face. “Hello, Doc,” she said softly and kissed him. “Hello, Doc,” she repeated happily. He lifted her off her feet and started to laugh. Neither of them saw me when I went up to my room. They didn’t seem to notice Mrs. Sapphia Spanella when she opened her door. “Be quiet!” she shouted. “Take your men away from this house!”

“Divorce him? Of course I never divorced him. I was only fourteen!” Holly lifted her empty glass. “Two more drinks, my darling Mr. Bell.”

We were in Joe Bell’s bar. “It’s early in the day for drinking,” he said. The clock behind the bar showed that it was not yet noon. We were already on our fourth drink.

“But it’s Sunday, Mr. Bell. The clocks are slow on Sundays. And I haven’t been to bed yet,” she told him. “Not to sleep,” she said quietly to me. She went red and turned away.

For the first time, she seemed to feel a need to explain her actions to me.

“I had to. Doc really loves me, you know. And I love him. He may look old to you but you don’t know him. He’s a kind man, he loves birds and children. He gave me a lot. Every night I ask God to watch over him. Stop smiling!” she said angrily. “I do love him.”

“You’re a very special person,” I said.

“Yes, I am,” she said. Her face, pale in the morning light, brightened. She smoothed her hair. “I look terrible. We spent the night in a bus station. Doc wanted me to go with him. I told him, ‘Doc, I’m not fourteen and I’m not Lulamae.’ But you know what’s sad? I am the same person. I’m still stealing eggs and running through the trees.”

Joe Bell put the fresh drinks in front of us.

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,” Holly told him. “That was Doc’s mistake. He was always bringing home wild things. Once it was a sick bird, then a wild cat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing. If you give them your heart, they get stronger. Then one day they are so strong that they run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. If you love a wild thing too much, they run away.”

“She’s drunk,” Joe Bell told me.

“A little,” Holly said. “But Doc understood. I explained it to him very carefully. We shook hands and he held me. He wants me to be happy.”

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

Holly lifted her glass and touched it against mine. “Good luck, Doc. Dearest Doc - it’s good to look at the sky. But you don’t want to live there. It’s a very empty place.”