How to Wash a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  I sat back in the chair and rubbed my eyes. Why would Oscar have asked Mr. Wang to deliver this to me? What calamitous event had he been preparing for? Had Oscar sensed his imminent stroke or was there a more sinister explanation?

  I heard a noise outside and walked through the living room to the window overlooking the street. Monty and Ivan were carrying the table and chairs back to Monty’s studio. I carefully refolded the map, slid it between two cookbooks on a shelf in the kitchen, and headed back downstairs.

  Monty and Ivan walked through the front door as I reached the showroom. From Monty’s expression, I could tell he was about to bombard me with questions about the package.

  “Ouch!” I cried out as I stubbed my toe on the still unopened crate that had covered the trap door to the basement.

  “Hey, can one of you help me open this crate?” I called out. Given Monty’s pathological penchant for disseminating information, I wasn’t ready to share this latest development with him. I needed a quick change of subject.

  “I’ve got it,” Monty said as he trotted towards the back of the room where I stood next to the crate. He leaned over the box and tried to read the water-stained shipping label.

  “Australia?” he called out curiously. “What would Oscar have ordered from Australia?”

  I shrugged my shoulders—puzzled, but relieved. His interest piqued, Monty dove into the task, momentarily forgetting about my package from Mr. Wang.

  “We’re going to need a crowbar on this,” he advised, looking at me with an air of crate-opening expertise.

  I fetched one from Oscar’s toolbox in a closet off the kitchen. “Here you go.”

  “Right, then,” he said, grabbing the handle. He approached the box awkwardly, holding the crowbar in his hands like a pickax. He laid the box down on one of its oblong sides and slid the slanted end of the crowbar into a grooved crack between two of the planked panels.

  I squinted at the box. Bracketed hinges appeared to line the edge of the panel Monty had chosen to attack with the crowbar.

  “I think you’ve inserted it into the hinged side of the lid,” I offered.

  “Yes.” He stood up, his voice tetchy. “Yes, it appears that I have.”

  Monty crouched down and tried to remove the crowbar, but it was now tightly wedged. He threw a leg over the crate, trying to improve his leverage. As I watched him straddling the crate, wrestling with the crowbar, I realized Ivan would have been a much better candidate for this task. So skillful with a sketch pad, Monty was a disaster with any device that might be stored in a toolbox.

  “Haven’t you done this before?” I asked. “Don’t the frames for your art studio come in this type of container?”

  “No, not really,” he sniped, throwing his weight against the crowbar. “Most of my pieces are done locally. I just go pick them up in the van.” He studied the thick shipping bands wrapped around the obstinate crate. “Even when they do come through the mail, they’ve never been cinched up quite like this.”

  Ivan heard the commotion and wandered towards the back of the showroom. Monty had rotated the box and was lying parallel to it on the floor, still trying to release the crowbar. Ivan’s face twisted as he tried not to laugh.

  “Need some help?” Ivan asked in response to my pleading look.

  Monty muttered up from the ground near the crate. “No need—I’ve got it covered.” His voice pitched higher as he strained against the crate.

  The hinges finally gave under the pressure from the crowbar. A loud crack of splitting wood ricocheted through the room as Monty’s head slammed backwards onto the floor with a thud. A snowstorm of tiny cedar shavings from the inside of the box showered the area.

  Wincing, Monty righted himself, pulled off the loosened metal bands, and raised the lid open the rest of the way. Despite the dusting of cedar shavings all over the floor, the inside of the crate was still flush with packing materials.

  “Shall we see what you’ve got then?” Monty asked, his hair and eyebrows covered with a dandruff of shavings. He waved his right hand in the air, wiggled his fingers, and plunged them down into the crate. A strange and somewhat horrified look came over his face as he grabbed hold of the item hidden under the cedar shavings.

  “What in the name of Helen of Troy is this?” Monty cried as he pulled an enormous furry object out of the box.

  Monty wrestled the beast to its feet and stepped back. We all stood there silently staring at it, rotating our heads one way, then another. Isabella hissed; her back arched. Rupert leaned forward, sniffing loudly.

  We were looking at a stuffed kangaroo that appeared to have been the project of an amateur taxidermist. The animal was standing upright on its two back legs, with one arm crooked out resting on its hip. The body was slightly misshapen, and the head had been contorted so that the animal looked like it was smiling. It was a pose I couldn’t imagine a kangaroo striking naturally.

  I was beginning to realize that there was a lot I didn’t know about my Uncle Oscar.

  THE BOARD MEETING was held around the corner from the Green Vase in an empty room in a renovated, red brick building.

  I followed Monty into the building and up a narrow flight of stairs. Monty clutched his ears instinctively as we rounded each turn of the staircase.

  At the top, we stepped out into a bright, window-lined hallway. Double doors opened into a rectangular room, whose high ceiling was covered in a decoratively stamped, copper-colored tin.

  I took a seat on the second row of chairs next to Ivan while Monty circled the room, mixing with the crowd.

  Five chairs lined the far side of a table that ran horizontally across the front of the room. Ivan confirmed that they would be occupied by each of the board members.

  Ivan began pointing out various people in the growing crowd. It seemed that he and Harold had done work for most of them. He nodded towards a lively looking woman with bouncing, brown hair and bright, peppery eyes.

  “That lady over there is Etty Gabella. She runs a Spanish-themed antiques store on the corner. She hired us to rewire the place last year. You wouldn’t have believed the condition of some of the circuits we stripped out of her walls. It’s a wonder the place hadn’t caught fire.”

  Next, Ivan indicated to a tall, well-dressed man with high cheekbones and smooth, espresso-brown skin.

  “And there’s Essian Diarra. I rebuilt the chimney in his place. Found a diary from the 1850s hidden behind a couple of layers of brick.”

  On the other side of the room, Monty was engaged in an animated conversation with Etty Gabella. Given the flailing arms gesticulating wildly around his head, I guessed that Monty was telling her his ear-biting spider story.

  I shook my head. “What is wrong with that man?”

  “Oh—he’s not so bad,” Ivan replied, chuckling. “He means well.”

  I rolled my eyes in response.

  Monty crossed the room, still stroking his ears, and leaned over our chairs. “I talked to the board secretary. We’re first on the agenda. He thinks we’ll go through without any problems.”

  I looked over Monty’s shoulder, and a sinking feeling plunged through my stomach. A short-statured man had just entered the boardroom. He had the same hawkish eyes and balding head I’d seen a couple of months earlier as I stood on the sidewalk outside the Green Vase struggling to unlock Oscar’s front door. No mustache, I confirmed, wondering what Monty could have been going on about.

  “I thought Frank Napis wasn’t going to be here?” I asked, perplexed.

  Monty jumped like a frightened rabbit and whipped his head around in a full-circle contortion, his panicked eyes searching the room.

  “What?” he splurted. “What do you mean? Frank’s here? Where?”

  “Right there,” I indicated with my head, not wanting to point. The short, balding man strode through the room, his square middle advancing in front of him. He began greeting various attendees with a grand, effusive hand pump.

  Monty noodled his head up
and down like a serpent, his eyes frantically pacing the room. “I don’t see him. Are you sure?”

  “He’s heading towards the back window,” I said in a hushed voice, trying not to draw attention to us. Monty’s anguished antics were spectacle enough.

  “That’s not Napis,” Ivan intoned quietly. “That’s Gordon Bosco, the chairman of the board.”

  Monty collapsed into the seat next to me, his hand on his chest. “Good grief woman, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  AFTER THE MANY hours of preparation with Monty and all of my nervousness leading up to it, I don’t remember much about the actual board meeting. It was as if time moved on without me, leaving me frozen in my seat.

  Afterwards, Ivan assured me that Monty had made the most thorough, in depth presentation in the history of the Jackson Square Historical Board. When Monty finally finished his presentation, our renovation project was approved unanimously—without comment or debate.

  But it had been impossible for me to focus on Monty’s speech. Throughout the entire meeting, my eyes never left Gordon Bosco, sitting in the center chair at the front table.

  I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t tear myself away from the gold, tulip-shaped cufflinks flickering on the sleeves of his starched, white shirt.

  They were identical to the ones Oscar had shown me at his kitchen table during the Leidesdorff story—the same cufflinks that I had picked out for him to wear during his funeral—the cufflinks that had disappeared along with my uncle as his casket lowered into the earth.

  Chapter 14

  I LAY IN Oscar’s old bed the next morning, groggily contemplating the events of the previous day. The cats slept at my feet, stretched out in the extra folds of the blankets I’d brought over from my apartment.

  The air was wet with the thick chill of fog, sending me deeper into the warmth of the bed. One of Rupert’s tightly shut eyes cracked open a sliver, warning me that it was far too early to disturb his beauty sleep.

  My head burrowed down into the pillow in agreement. Almost instantly, I fell back into a deep, pre-dawn slumber. Bundled in the cushioning cocoon of blankets, every joint thoroughly un-tensed, my head sunk down through the pillows and picked up the thread of an earlier, unfinished dream.

  I walked towards a faint, glowing light as the uneven tile floor of the kitchen appeared beneath my feet. The peeling wallpaper rose before my eyes, along with a happily gurgling dishwasher. Happy, I saw, because its owner’s hunched back stood near the stove, cooking up a skillet of fried chicken. Oscar turned as I reached out to touch him on the shoulder, and the gruff exterior of his face broke into a broad, warm smile.

  Oscar was holding something in his hand. He stretched out his arm to offer it to me. The object glowed a gold metallic in his rough, worn fingers—the image of a tulip flickered in the warm light of the kitchen.

  I reached out to take it from him, my fingers curling around the hard metal surface. The object rolled in the palm of my hand. I looked down and saw that my fingers were wrapped around the tulip-shaped handle of the gold key.

  My gaze bounced back up to Oscar, but his face was slowly changing. I watched, horrified, as his round, grizzled cheeks flattened into loose, flopping jowls. His gray hair darkened into oily, black strands. His cheery, blue eyes sunk into his skull, shrinking to dark, beady pupils.

  Harold Wombler’s snarling voice echoed in my head as I stared at the worn, shredded overalls that had suddenly replaced Oscar’s stained, navy blue shirt.

  “What are you up to Monkey-mery?”

  I tried to speak but my voice remained silent, my vocal cords paralyzed, as the face in front of me morphed again. The cartilage of the nose grew into a sharp protrusion, beaking out over thin, nearly invisible lips, and I found myself face to face with Gordon Bosco.

  I stepped backwards, trying to distance myself from his portly figure and finely tailored, double-breasted suit. He tugged on his starched white cuffs, revealing tulip-shaped cufflinks that twinkled in the light. . . .

  “Whugh!” The sound squeezed out of my throat as Rupert jumped on my stomach and crawled up to my face. Apparently, it was time for breakfast.

  I FILLED UP the cats’ food bowls and headed down the stairs to the showroom, grabbing the parchment map and a couple of San Francisco guidebooks along the way.

  I passed the stuffed kangaroo on my way out the front door. In this misty light, it looked like a character from a B-grade horror movie.

  “I’ve got to get rid of that thing,” I thought, shaking my head as I walked outside.

  The fog covered everything like a trench coat. Figures as close as the opposite side of the street retained their anonymity, making it difficult to shake the eeriness of my dream.

  A couple of blocks later, I entered the financial district. The streets filled up with crowds of lawyers, stockbrokers, secretaries, and salesmen, littering the sidewalks with the one-sided cackle of their cell phone conversations. The pumping gears of delivery trucks and the screeching brakes of Muni buses filled in a deafening white noise as an army of suited, stone-faced warriors flashed by me, white iPod tails dangling from their ears.

  It was 8:55 a.m. on Montgomery Street, crunch time for the army of ants scurrying to their offices. I stood with my ex-brethren on a corner, waiting for the light to change, feeling the heated radiation of their stress and anxiety. The force of my old routine tugged at me, threatening to suck me back in. If I closed my eyes, I felt certain my feet would turn off towards the accounting firm—left at this corner, then two blocks down. I imagined my closet-sized cubicle, forlornly waiting for my return.

  The signal turned to green, and everything started to move again. I continued straight across the intersection, bypassing the left turn, wrenching myself free from the siren call of my cubicle. By the time I reached the opposite side of the street, my head was up, my vision sharp and clear. A fresh breeze whistled through the fog-laden streets, chasing the murky spirit back to its ocean lair.

  It’s funny the things you notice when your perspective changes. I must have passed that corner hundreds of times before, but—for the first time—I noticed a gold-colored plaque set into the brick wall of a bank building. To the consternation of the crowds rushing past me, I stopped to read it.

  The marker commemorated the spot where, on July 9, 1846, Captain John B. Montgomery sailed the USS Portsmouth into the small settlement of Yerba Buena and disembarked. I leaned forward, squinting to read the raised text mounted on the block as the last office stragglers screeched around me, racing to make their elevators before the clock ticked nine.

  From here, I read, the captain had marched his men up the hill a couple of blocks to the center of town and claimed the territory of California for the United States. The few Mexican soldiers on patrol had left a couple of days before his arrival. In that pre-Gold Rush atmosphere, neither the United States nor the Mexican government had much interest in the isolated backwater that would become San Francisco.

  The streets emptied as the hour hand broke nine. I crossed the street in decadent luxury, skipping lightly over the cable car tracks, and walked a couple of blocks down to my destination—a nondescript alley fronted by a pair of stately stone office buildings. A narrow canyon of asphalt sliced between the two structures, providing outdoor seating for a coffee shop that occupied a commercial space on the street level of one of the buildings.

  A small street sign hung off a lamppost, barely noticeable against the fog-enhanced backdrop. The sign labeled the shaded alley: LEIDESDORFF.

  I took a seat at a small table in the alley outside the coffee shop. Sharp rays of sun began to slice through the fog as I pulled the parchment and the guidebooks out of my backpack and spread them out on the table. From the text of one of the reference books, I realized that Leidesdorff’s warehouse had been located just across the way, on the other side of California Street.

  According to the book, the warehouse had been situated on the water’s edge so that at high tide, small ru
nner boats could pull up to it and unload their cargo. The warehouse had been a transit point for raw materials from Northern California ranches, sugar cane from Hawaii, and manufactured goods from the East Coast.

  In the present day geography, the city’s shoreline was several blocks to the east. Even without the fog’s impediment, the water was no longer visible from this location.

  I tried to imagine away the towering masonry encircling my table, envisioning a damp bank of sand trafficked by burly frontiersmen hefting bundles of fur and skins. Their heavy boots thunked up the wide, wooden steps of the warehouse into a receiving area where a tall, swarthy, lamb-chopped Leidesdorff entered their goods into his ledger book.

  My mental image evaporated with the jarring clang of a trolley car clattering along California Street. I returned to the book.

  An American solider named Joseph Folsom had purchased the warehouse property from Leidesdorff right before he died. Folsom built a hotel on the site, expanding it into the landfill lot next-door.

  In its day, the Tehama Hotel had been a landmark for the city’s social elite. Famous financier William Ralston and his wife lived there for several months after their marriage while they waited for their prestigious Nob Hill residence to be built. Ralston had been so taken with the hotel’s location that he later purchased the land for the site of his bank.

  The bank’s first building had burned down after the 1906 earthquake, but its replacement was equally grand. I walked around the corner of the coffee shop to study it in person. Elaborate, stone pillars supported a Parthenon-like structure; Italianate detailing trimmed every edge. Despite the elaborate décor, the bank presented a solid, dignified front.