Флетчер Флора - Take Me Home

“Where can I meet you?”

“I’m not sure that I want you to meet me. Why should I?”

“Because you want to find Ivy, and so do I. I can be of help. You don’t have a car, do you?”

“No.”

“Do you propose to walk the streets all night? In my car, we may have a chance of finding her. At least we can check the cheap hotels in your area. I don’t suppose she had much money.”

“Twenty dollars, I think. Not much more.”

“That won’t last long, and God knows what she may do after it goes. We must find her, that’s all, and then she must come back to stay with me. I hope you’re convinced by this time that no other arrangement will work. She simply can’t be allowed to go on jeopardizing herself and causing endless trouble for others.”

“What she does is something she will decide for herself.”

“All right. Will you tell me where we can meet?”

“There’s an all-night diner down the street from here. The Greek’s. You’d better meet me there.”

“Give me the address.”

He told her how to find the place, and then he hung up and went there to wait for her. George, behind the counter, watched him with a frown as he crossed from the door and sat down on a stool. The customary warmth of his reception was totally lacking, and in the severity of George’s gaze there was more than a hint of disapproval.

“It’s apparent,” George said, “that you are feeling despondent tonight. Could it be because your conscience is bothering you?”

“Why the hell should my conscience be bothering me?”

“One’s conscience becomes a bother when one has done something he should not have done, or failed to do something he should have. Provided, of course, one has a conscience to begin with.”

It was obvious that George was making some kind of point about something, preferring for his own reasons to be devious instead of direct, but Henry was in no mood for subtleties. It had been, since the bad beginning of the abortive fiasco of the morning, a long and difficult day, coming to a kind of climax in the feverish episode in the apartment of Lila Galvin, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had not, on the whole, accounted very well for himself in the day’s events.

“George,” he said, “I have a notion that you’re referring obliquely to something specific in which I seem somehow to be involved. With all due respect for the subtlety of the Greek mind, which is notoriously devious, I’d appreciate it if you’d say directly what you mean.”

“Gladly,” George said. “I was referring to your shameful treatment of Ivy.”

“Oh? Am I to understand from this that you’ve seen her today?”

“She was here this morning to say good-by and to have breakfast.”

“I suppose she gave you a full report on all my qualifications as a son of a bitch. Is that it?”

“On the contrary, she had nothing bad to report. She said, merely, that you had ordered her to leave. Although I had doubts about her in the beginning, especially in relation to you and the book, I confess that I have become very fond of her since, and I don’t mind saying that I consider it more than likely that I was worried about the wrong person.”

“The hell with that! Did she say where she was going?”

“Not knowing, she couldn’t say. But she asked me to recommend a cheap hotel as a place to go for the time being, and I suggested the Hawkins.”

“Did she go there?”

“I don’t know.

“You going down there and see?”

“I don’t know why I should.”

“She’s a nice girl, Henry. She has her trouble.”

“She has a hell of a lot more trouble than you know about.”

“I will tell you one thing, Henry. I would never take a sweet girl with trouble into my house for shelter and then put her into the cold street for no sufficient reason. Sometimes I, too, am inclined to believe that it will be a lousy book that no one will buy.”

“By God, it looks right now as if it will never even be written. How the hell do you know I had no sufficient reason?”

“In spite of certain foolishnesses, she is a nice girl. It would be too bad if she came to a bad end.”

“All right, George. You can get off my back now. I’ll go down to the Hawkins and see if she’s there. Damn it, I intended to go from the start. Why the hell do you think I’m out prowling the streets, if not to try to find her?”

“In that case, I’ll spare you the ignominy of explaining how you got the scratches on your face that look as if they may have been made by fingernails.”

“That’s right, George. Spare me. And, incidentally, go to hell.”

Getting off the stool at the counter, he walked over to the door and stopped, making a pretense of adjusting his collar against the cold outside. He was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by others, and most of all he was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by himself. He wished, however, that it had not come to this between him and the Greek. He liked George and did not wish to lose his friendship, and he waited now inside the door in the hope that George would say a healing word. Having sustained the pretense of adjusting the collar as long as he could, he reached for the door handle and was about to leave when the Greek finally spoke.

“Henry,” George said.

“Yes.”

“It would also be too bad for friends to become strangers.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I spoke hastily about the book. It will be good and sell well.”

“Thank you, George. And I, for my part, don’t really want you to go to hell.”

“I hardly thought so.”

“Good night, George. I’ll see you soon.”

“Let us hope so.”

Henry opened the door and went out. He felt better after the pacific exchange, but at the same time he began to develop a premonition that grew stronger with each step in the street until it was so strong that he could not dispel it by reason or disregard, and the premonition was that Ivy was dead.

He walked rapidly down the street toward the Hawkins, exercising restraint to keep from breaking into a trot, and his compulsion to hurry was as irrational as his conviction of death, for if Ivy was dead hurrying had no point. But he hurried, nevertheless, and he had covered half the distance to the hotel before he remembered that he had agreed to wait for Lila at the Greek’s. Well, she would probably inquire for him there, and George would tell her where he had gone. She could follow if she chose, and if she did not choose, it did not matter. His only concern now was to see as quickly as possible if his premonition was true or not, and he could not doubt that it was.

To give the premonition credence, there was the fact that Ivy had already tried once to kill herself, and had almost succeeded. In addition to this, he attached an ominous significance to the report that she had apparently gone immediately from the diner to the hotel. Hotel rooms were often used by suicides. He had read about; such deaths in the newspapers, and there were probably many more that were kept quiet or passed off as being natural. The odd thing about it was that many such suicides could much more easily have destroyed themselves elsewhere, in their homes or offices, for instance, and it was possible that they were trying in a twisted sort of way to remove the shame and sorrow of their self-destruction from the places and people they knew and loved, simply be removing the act to a strange place among strangers. It could be that Ivy had been so motivated. She had had the day alone above the bookstore in which to kill herself, but she had thought of him in the end, as she had not thought of him in her first attempt, and had gone away to a hotel to save him trouble.

He saw the sign of the hotel hanging high above the sidewalk ahead of him. Increasing his pace until he was in fact moving at a kind of awkward lope, he crossed an intersection and was no more than thirty feet from the hotel’s entrance when he stopped abruptly in his traces with a gasp, as if he had suddenly been struck a powerful blow to the solar plexus, and he had for a moment an absurd fear that he was going to faint. For there ahead of him, coming from the opposite direction, was Ivy herself with a man. The man had a hand on her arm in casual, public intimacy, and she seemed to be allowing this intimacy with complete congeniality, but whether she was congenial or not, she was certainly not dead.