“I’d rather you didn’t swear, Amelia. The children might hear.”
“I don’t care if they do.”
The whole thing degenerated from there. I tried to explain the cat’s connection with Delia’s death. But Stephen had stopped listening by then. He sulked through dinner. Eleanor and Rose argued over who got which spoonful of peas. And I struggled with a steadily growing sense of dread that seemed much too large for the facts of the matter.
When dinner was over, Stephen announced with exaggerated brightness, “Girls, we’d like your help in deciding an important question.”
“Oh goody,” said Rose.
“What is it?” said Eleanor.
“Please don’t,” I said. It was all I could do to keep from shouting.
Stephen flashed me the boyish grin with which he had originally won my heart. “Oh, come on. Try to look at it objectively. You’re just sensitive about this because of an irrational notion from your childhood. Let the girls judge. If they like it, why not keep it?”
I should have ended it there. I should have insisted. Hindsight is always perfect, as they say. But inside me a little seed of doubt had sprouted. Stephen was always so logical and so right, especially about financial matters. Maybe he was right about this, too.
He had brought the thing home from the appraiser without telling me. He was never above a little subterfuge if it got him his own way. Now he carried the carton in from the garage and unwrapped it in the middle of our warm, hardwood floor, with all the lights blazing. Nothing had changed. I found it as frightening as ever. I could feel cold sweat collecting on my forehead as I stared at it, all aglitter in a rainbow of refracted lamplight.
Eleanor was enthralled with it. She caught our real cat, a calico named Jelly, and held it up to the sculpture. “See, Jelly? You’ve got a handsome partner now.” But Jelly twisted and hissed in Eleanor’s arms until she let her go. Eleanor laughed and said Jelly was jealous.
Rose was almost as uncooperative as Jelly. She shrank away from the glass cat, peeking at it from between her father’s knees. But Stephen would have none of that.
“Go on, Rose,” he said. “It’s just a kitty made of glass. Touch it and see.” And he took her by the shoulders and pushed her gently toward it. She put out one hand, hesitantly, as she would have with a live cat who did not know her. I saw her finger touch a nodule of glass shards that might have been its nose. She drew back with a little yelp of pain. And that’s how it began. So innocently.
“He bit me!” she cried.
“What happened?” said Stephen. “Did you break it?” He ran to the sculpture first, the brute, to make sure she hadn’t damaged it.
She held her finger out to me. There was a tiny cut with a single drop of bright red blood oozing from it. “Mommy, it burns, it burns.” She was no longer just crying. She was screaming.
We took her into the bathroom. Stephen held her while I washed the cut and pressed a cold cloth to it. The bleeding stopped in a moment, but still she screamed. Stephen grew angry. “What’s this nonsense? It’s a scratch. Just a scratch.”
Rose jerked and kicked and bellowed. In Stephen’s defense, I tell you now it was a terrifying sight, and he was never able to deal well with real fear, especially in himself. He always tried to mask it with anger. We had a neighbor who was a physician. “If you don’t stop it, Rose, I’ll call Doctor Pepperman. Is that what you want?” he said, as if Doctor Pepperman, a jolly septuagenarian, were anything but charming and gentle, as if threats were anything but asinine at such a time.
“For God’s sake, get Pepperman! Can’t you see something’s terribly wrong?” I said.
And for once he listened to me. He grabbed Eleanor by the arm. “Come with me,” he said and stomped across the yard through the snow without so much as a coat. I believe he only took Eleanor, also without a coat, because he was so unnerved that he didn’t want to face the darkness alone.
Rose was still screaming when Dr. Pepperman arrived fresh from his dinner, specks of gravy clinging to his mustache. He examined Rose’s finger and looked mildly puzzled when he had finished. “Can’t see much wrong here. I’d say it’s mostly a case of hysteria.” He took a vial and a syringe from his small, brown case and gave Rose an injection, “to help settle her down,” he said. It seemed to work. In a few minutes, Rose’s screams had diminished to whimpers. Pepperman swabbed her finger with disinfectant and wrapped it loosely in gauze. “There, Rosie. Nothing like a bandage to make it feel better.” He winked at us. “She should be fine in the morning. Take the gauze off as soon as shell let you.”
We put Rose to bed and sat with her till she fell asleep. Stephen unwrapped the gauze from her finger so the healing air could get to it. The cut was a bit red, but looked all right. Then we retired as well, reassured by the doctor, still mystified at Rose’s reaction.
I awakened sometime after midnight. The house was muffled in the kind of silence brought by steady, soft snowfall. I thought I had heard a sound. Something odd. A scream? A groan? A snarl? Stephen still slept on the verge of a snore; whatever it was, it hadn’t been loud enough to disturb him.
I crept out of bed and fumbled with my robe. There was a short flight of stairs between our room and the rooms where Rose and Eleanor slept. Eleanor, like her father, often snored at night, and I could hear her from the hallway now, probably deep in dreams. Rose’s room was silent.
I went in and switched on the night-light. The bulb had very low wattage. I thought at first that the shadows were playing tricks on me. Rose’s hand and arm looked black as a bruised banana. There was a peculiar odor in the air, like the smell of a butcher shop on a summer day. Heart galloping, I turned on the overhead light. Poor Rosie. She was so very still and clammy. And her arm was so very rotten.
They said Rose died from blood poisoning—a rare type most often associated with animal bites. I told them over and over again that it fit, that our child had indeed been bitten, by a cat, a most evil glass cat. Stephen was embarrassed. His own theory was that, far from blaming an apparently inanimate object, we ought to be suing Pepperman for malpractice. The doctors patted me sympathetically at first. Delusions brought on by grief, they said. It would pass. I would heal in time.
I made Stephen take the cat away. He said he would sell it, though in fact he lied to me. And we buried Rose. But I could not sleep. I paced the house each night, afraid to close my eyes because the cat was always there, glaring his satisfied glare, and waiting for new meat. And in the daytime, everything reminded me of Rosie. Fingerprints on the woodwork, the contents of the kitchen drawers, her favorite foods on the shelves of grocery stores. I could not teach. Every child had Rosie’s face and Rosie’s voice. Stephen and Eleanor were first kind, then gruff, then angry.
One morning, I could find no reason to get dressed or to move from my place on the sofa. Stephen shouted at me, told me I was ridiculous, asked me if I had forgotten that I still had a daughter left who needed me. But, you see, I no longer believed that I or anyone else could make any difference in the world. Stephen and Eleanor would get along with or without me. I didn’t matter. There was no God of order and cause. Only chaos, cruelty, and whim.
When it was clear to Stephen that his dear wife Amy had turned from an asset into a liability, he sent me to an institution, far away from everyone, where I could safely be forgotten. In time, I grew to like it there. I had no responsibilities at all. And if there was foulness and bedlam, it was no worse than the outside world.
There came a day, however, when they dressed me in a suit of new clothes and stood me outside the big glass and metal doors to wait; they didn’t say for what. The air smelled good. It was springtime, and there were dandelions sprinkled like drops of fresh yellow paint across the lawn.
A car drove up and a pretty young woman got out and took me by the arm.
“Hello, Mother,” she said as we drove off down the road. It was Eleanor, all grown up. For the first time since Rosie died, I wondered how long I had
been away, and knew it must have been a very long while.
We drove a considerable distance, to a large suburban house, white, with a sprawling yard and a garage big enough for two cars. It was a mansion compared to the house in which Stephen and I had raised her. By way of making polite small talk, I asked if she was married, whether she had children. She climbed out of the car looking irritated. “Of course I’m married,” she said. “You’ve met Jason. And you’ve seen pictures of Sarah and Elizabeth often enough.” Of this I had no recollection.
She opened the gate in the picket fence, and we started up the neat, stone walkway. The front door opened a few inches, and small faces peered out. The door opened wider, and two little girls ran onto the porch.
“Hello,” I said. “And who are you?”
The older one, giggling behind her hand, said, “Don’t you know, Grandma? I’m Sarah.”
The younger girl stayed silent, staring at me with frank curiosity.
“That’s Elizabeth. She’s afraid of you,” said Sarah.
I bent and looked into Elizabeth’s eyes. They were brown, and her hair was shining blond, like Rosie’s. “No need to be afraid of me, my dear. I’m just a harmless old woman.”
Elizabeth frowned. “Are you crazy?” she asked.
Sarah giggled behind her hand again, and Eleanor breathed loudly through her nose as if this impertinence was simply overwhelming.
I smiled. I liked Elizabeth. Liked her very much. “They say I am,” I said, “and it may very well be true.”
A tiny smile crossed her face. She stretched on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek, hardly more than the touch of a warm breeze, then turned and ran away. Sarah followed her, and I watched them go, my heart dancing and shivering. I had loved no one in a very long time. I missed it, but dreaded it, too. For I had loved Delia and Rosie, and they were both dead.
The first thing I saw when I entered the house was Chelichev’s Cat in Glass, glaring evilly from a place of obvious honor on a low pedestal near the sofa. My stomach felt suddenly shrunken.
“Where did you get that?” I said.
Eleanor looked irritated again. “From Daddy, of course.”
“Stephen promised me he would sell it!”
“Well, I guess he didn’t, did he?”
Anger heightened my pulse. “Where is he? I want to speak to him immediately.”
“Mother, don’t be absurd. He’s been dead for ten years.”
I lowered myself into a chair. I was shaking by then, and I fancied I saw a half smile on the glass cat’s cold jowls.
“Get me out of here,” I said. A great weight crushed my lungs. I could barely breathe.
With a look, I must say, of genuine worry, Eleanor escorted me onto the porch and brought me a tumbler of ice water. “Better?” she asked.
I breathed deeply. “A little. Eleanor, don’t you realize that monstrosity killed your sister, and mine as well?”
“That simply isn’t true.”
“But it is, it is! I’m telling you now, get rid of it if you care for the lives of your children.”
Eleanor went pale, whether from rage or fear I could not tell. “It isn’t yours. You’re legally incompetent, and I’ll thank you to stay out of my affairs as much as possible till you have a place of your own. I’ll move you to an apartment as soon as I can find one.”
“An apartment? But I can’t …”
“Yes you can. You’re as well as you’re ever going to be, Mother. You only liked that hospital because it was easy. Well it costs a lot of money to keep you there, and we can’t afford it anymore. You’re just going to have to straighten up and start behaving like a human being again.”
By then I was very close to tears, and very confused as well. Only one thing was clear to me, and that was the true nature of the glass cat. I said, in as steady a voice as I could muster, “Listen to me. That cat was made out of madness. It’s evil. If you have a single ounce of brains, you’ll put it up for auction this very afternoon.”
“So I can get enough money to send you back to the hospital, I suppose? Well I won’t do it. That sculpture is priceless. The longer we keep it, the more it’s worth.”
She had Stephen’s financial mind. I would never sway her, and I knew it. I wept in despair, hiding my face in my hands. I was thinking of Elizabeth. The sweet, soft skin of her little arms, the flame in her cheeks, the power of that small kiss. Human beings are such frail works of art, their lives so precarious, and here I was again, my wayward heart gone out to one of them. But the road back to the safety of isolation lay in ruins. The only way out was through.
Jason came home at dinnertime, and we ate a nice meal, seated around the sleek rosewood table in the dining room. He was kind, actually far kinder than Eleanor. He asked the children about their day and listened carefully while they replied. As did I, enraptured by their pink perfection, distraught at the memory of how imperfect a child’s flesh can become. He did not interrupt. He did not demand. When Eleanor refused to give me coffee—she said she was afraid it would get me “hyped up”—he admonished her and poured me a cup himself. We talked about my father, whom he knew by reputation, and about art and the cities of Europe. All the while, I felt in my bones the baleful gaze of the Cat in Glass, burning like the coldest ice through walls and furniture as if they did not exist.
Eleanor made up a cot for me in the guest room. She didn’t want me to sleep in the bed and she wouldn’t tell me why. But I overheard Jason arguing with her about it. “What’s wrong with the bed?” he said.
“She’s mentally ill,” said Eleanor. She was whispering, but loudly. “Heaven only knows what filthy habits she’s picked up. I won’t risk her soiling a perfectly good mattress. If she does well on the cot for a few nights, then we can consider moving her to the bed.”
They thought I was in the bathroom, performing whatever unspeakable acts it is that mentally ill people perform in places like that, I suppose. But they were wrong. I was sneaking past their door, on my way to the garage. Jason must have been quite a handyman in his spare time. I found a large selection of hammers on the wall, including an excellent short-handled sledge. I hid it under my bedding. They never even noticed.
The children came in and kissed me good-night in a surreal reversal of roles. I lay in the dark on my cot for a long time, thinking of them, especially of Elizabeth, the youngest and weakest, who would naturally be the most likely target of an animal’s attack. I dozed, dreaming sometimes of a smiling Elizabeth-Rose-Delia, sifting snow, wading through drifts; sometimes of the glass cat, its fierce eyes smoldering, crystalline tongue brushing crystalline jaws. The night was well along when the dreams crashed down like broken mirrors into silence.
The house was quiet except for those ticks and thumps all houses make as they cool in the darkness. I got up and slid the hammer out from under the bedding, not even sure what I was going to do with it, knowing only that the time had come to act.
I crept out to the front room, where the cat sat waiting, as I knew it must. Moonlight gleamed in the chaos of its glass fur. I could feel its power, almost see it, a shimmering red aura the length of its malformed spine. The thing was moving, slowly, slowly, smiling now, oh yes, a real smile. I could smell its rotten breath.
For an instant, I was frozen. Then I remembered the hammer, Jason’s lovely short-handled sledge. And I raised it over my head and brought it down in the first crashing blow.
The sound was wonderful. Better than cymbals, better even than holy trumpets. I was trembling all over, but I went on and on in an agony of satisfaction while glass fell like moonlit rain. There were screams. “Grandma, stop! Stop!” I swung the hammer back in the first part of another arc, heard something like the thunk of a fallen ripe melon, swung it down on the cat again. I couldn’t see anymore. It came to me that there was glass in my eyes and blood in my mouth. But none of that mattered, a small price to pay for the long overdue demise of Chelichev’s Cat in Glass.
So you see how I have co
me to this, not without many sacrifices along the way. And now the last of all: The sockets where my eyes used to be are infected. They stink. Blood poisoning, I’m sure.
I wouldn’t expect Eleanor to forgive me for ruining her prime investment. But I hoped Jason might bring the children a time or two anyway. No word except for the delivery of a single rose yesterday. The matron said it was white and held it up for me to sniff, and she read me the card that came with it. “Elizabeth was a great one for forgiving. She would have wanted you to have this. Sleep well, Jason.”
Which puzzled me.
“You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?” said the matron.
“I destroyed a valuable work of art,” said I.
But she made no reply.
LUNCH AT ETIENNE’S
Marion Cumberly sorted through her winter coats, a bother, but it had to be done. July or not, she could see her breath. A fragile layer of ice had formed on all the puddles, indoors and out, and there was even snow of a sort, grayish and not very wet. The weather seemed to be out of order lately. She sighed. If the phone were working, she would have called the president of the American Meteorological Association, an old school chum of her husband’s, to complain directly. She wished Mrs. Halprin, the housekeeper, would come to work again so she could tell her about the phone and get it repaired properly. Mrs. Halprin was a veritable sorceress when it came to dealing with service people. But Mrs. Halprin seemed to have disappeared.
Marion slapped irritably at the coats. Puffs of whitish powder rose from them. The closet doors had fallen off, so the coats, like everything else, had gotten covered with dust. The question was, which one should she wear to Chez Etienne for her luncheon date with Irene Rutledge. She had two furs—a mink and a Russian sable. The sable was extremely warm. She reached for it, then hesitated, her small hand hovering over the silky fur. Now that she thought of it, the sable wouldn’t do. Chez Etienne was an elegant place, but unassuming. She would be overdressed, and everyone would stare at her as she came through the door. It was bad enough having to bring little Nicky along. At a place like Chez Etienne, a woman in the company of a two-year-old would be a spectacle, even without a sable coat.
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