Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God

by Paul Gallico

  He said, “The reports have been returned from Edinburgh and they tally with what my examination indicated. There is nothing organically wrong with the child. There is not so much as the suspicion of a growth in the throat or the vicinity of the vocal chords. Scrapings were negative. The blood tests likewise. I do not mind telling you that at one time I suspected leukemia—separate and apart from the loss of speech. Well, we shall not have to worry about that any longer. The child is sound.”

  MacDhui breathed a long sigh: “Ahhhh! That is good.”

  “Yes,” Dr. Strathsay agreed, “that is indeed good and I feel greatly relieved on that score. Kidneys, heart, and lungs are in excellent order. Later we may want an encephalograph. However I am certain the brain is not affected.”

  MacDhui exhaled again. “I am glad to have your opinion as to the brain. As long as there is nothing seriously—”

  Dr. Strathsay nodded and poked at a cluster of beach pebbles with his steel-shod cane. “Nevertheless,” he said, “the child is gravely ill.”

  The veterinary repeated the words “gravely ill” as though he wished to be sure that this was what the doctor said and, while MacDhui maintained outward composure, inwardly he felt close to panic again. It struck him as a fearful phrase to hear from the lips of a doctor. The adjective was rattling around inside his head and he was trying to seize it, to make it hold still long enough to place it beneath a kind of mental microscope to see what it was made up of, what it contained, what menace, what hope. A situation that was grave was bad, yet not irretrievable. People had extricated themselves from grave situations—but never from the grave itself— He heard himself say, “Nevertheless since, as you say, she is suffering from no discernible cause—”

  “Perhaps there is an indiscernible origin to be sought,” Dr. Strathsay concluded. “In my grandfather’s time people sickened from a number of causes not officially countenanced today. One read of a rejected suitor pining away, becoming hollow-eyed and gaunt; maidens suffering frustration in love became delicate and feeble and took to their beds. Betrayed wives, or aging women fearing betrayal became invalids or even paralytics, and all of these ailments were treated as genuine, which indeed they were. The sickness of a woman who cannot walk or suffers from fainting spells is just as real as—a child who suddenly cannot speak.”

  While Mr. MacDhui listened attentively he was thinking furiously all the while about the word “grave,” and what it was exactly Dr. Strathsay was trying to say to him in words, both spoken as well as unspoken.

  Oh, the hell of medicine and the human relationship! Was there any leaven of hope tucked away in that word “gravely”? He remembered suddenly and appallingly the hopes that he himself so frequently had denied and he had an instant of almost fierce relief that he did not believe in God, for in the God-regulated world transgression and punishment went hand in hand. It was something to cling to at the moment that the wicked and ungodly frequently were found sitting at the top of the heap. If he believed, it would have to be in a God who might take Mary Ruadh away from him, “call her to Him,” as the preachers put it, because he was judged not fit to be her father— He did not reply to what the doctor had said, and the latter, after prodding at some purple weed and sea slime carried in by the tide, continued.

  “Were my late grandfather, Dr. Alexander Strathsay, to return to this earth and visit Mary Ruadh, he would enter, sniff the air of the sickroom, half his diagnosis completed as he crossed to the bed, take the chin of the patient in his hand and look long and piercingly into her eyes. He would satisfy himself that there was no organic malfunctioning, and thereafter, closing the door of the room behind him, would announce without further equivocation to the nearest relative, ‘That child is dying of a broken heart.’ ”

  Mr. MacDhui still did not speak, but it was from numbing shock now. So there was punishment after all, punishment not arranged by any magistrates or judges, read out from codes of law, but sentences nevertheless to be lived, worked or suffered out. Yet by whom and where from were they ordained? Was there somewhere in the universe a scales that worked out weight for weight and measure for measure and for how long you had to pay? And whose justice and what kind was it to impose a lifetime of guilt, misery, and regret as quittance for the expunged life of a sick cat? Was this a planned vindictiveness from behind the stars, or just the luck of a spinning globe wandering in its orbit, unhampered, with chance, as in the turning roulette wheel, the ar biter into which slot or morass the little pellet of your life should sink?

  “If I were not a reasonably modern practitioner, familiar with modern methods which read the pulsations of the heart by electricity, I might be tempted to say with my grandfather, ‘That child is ill of and suffering from a broken heart.’ And for this, the finest mechanical heart built and prepared to beat during repairs in Edinburgh hospital is no substitute, and no electrocardiograph will show why it is slowly failing—”

  They came to a boundary fence where the public path ended at private property and the two reversed their steps as the gray curtain of rain shrouding the hills opposite began to edge across the narrow arm of the loch.

  “I think we shall have a taste of that,” Dr. Strathsay remarked of the threatening weather, and then added, “Had you ever thought of remarrying, Andrew?”

  Mr. MacDhui stopped still upon the path and stared at his companion. A month ago he would have replied unequivocally, “No, nor do I ever intend to.” But in that same moment in which, with the simple inspiration of the great doctor, Strathsay had reached to the heart of the matter of his daughter’s illness, so had he with similar accuracy probed the dilemma on which MacDhui had been impaled ever since for the first time he had laid eyes on Lori.

  “No, no,” the old man assured MacDhui, “I am not meaning to pry into your affairs as it may have sounded. What I am trying to say is that the child needs love.”

  “As if I did not love her—to despair,” groaned Mr. Veterinary MacDhui, and for that instant could not have said whether he was speaking of Mary Ruadh or Lori. He knew only that he loved them both and one was slipping away from him and the other was unattainable.

  “Yes, yes,” conceded the doctor, his sad bloodhounds’ eyes looking sympathetically upon his colleague, “that is indeed true of all us fathers. We love them to despair, or to distraction, or to the limit of our abilities insofar as they reflect our own images. And we give them their first experience of the power of the love of man, but it is not the same as the softer, more protective, more secure and sweeter love of a woman or a mother.”

  “I have tried—” MacDhui began, when Strathsay interrupted him.

  “I am not saying, Andrew, that you would not have succeeded had not a serious crisis arisen in the life of the child, the details of which I do not yet know. But it must have begun before the cry in the night that was like that of her dead pet.”

  “It began the day I had the cat chloroformed.”

  “I suspected as much. It is just during such times of exaggerated grief or crisis that parents of both sexes are most sorely needed to tide them over. Each makes a necessary contribution, he of strength, she of tenderness and feminine understanding and when these two are beautifully combined a bulwark is reared, a dike against which the storms lash in vain.”

  “Is this your prescription then?” Mr. MacDhui asked bleakly, and with such an expression of despair upon his otherwise lively and aggressive countenance that Dr. Strathsay could not forego a gentle laugh.

  “Come on, man,” he said. “You aren’t being led to the block yet. Don’t look as though the executioner were beckoning.”

  “Still if Mary Ruadh is—grave—” MacDhui hesitated over the hateful phrase and Dr. Strathsay completed it for him.

  “Gravely ill. Yes, I used the word ‘gravely’ advisedly, for there is a process working that must be reversed. She is proceeding downward along a path that—well, she must be turned from it. But I would say that she was in no immediate danger, for she has always been a h
ealthy child with vitality and resistance. We will try to keep that resistance high.”

  They were approaching the outskirts of the town and the lane close to the shore where MacDhui lived. The doctor gave him a clap on the arm and said, “Come, man, don’t look so glum. Let’s see some bristle back in that great, red bush of yours. All is far from lost and we will do everything that is possible to—bring her back. Love, love, love! Give her love in great, huge, heaping overdoses. Had I a warehouse as big as Ben Lomond, or The Cobbler, filled with love, I should soon empty it with prescriptions, for there is no better cure in the world for the ailments of man, woman, or child—and for beasts as well, as you no doubt have discovered for yourself in your profession. Well, I’ll be off,” and he went stumping down the street.

  MacDhui watched him out of sight with reluctance. For the first time he was experiencing that dependency upon the man of healing that humans come to feel when sickness strikes and death threatens, and that sense of loneliness when the doctor leaves. For MacDhui there was nothing or no one else to whom to turn.

  He entered the house and, shedding his hat and mackintosh, went into Mary’s room. He was used now to the silence reigning in a house that had once rung cheerfully with the noisy presence of a young child.

  Mary Ruadh lay half propped up by pillows, her red hair and the extreme pallor of her face contrasting with the green comforter thrown about her to keep her warm. She lay staring up at the ceiling. Mrs. McKenzie had been sitting at her bedside, sewing, but she now, with an instinctive feeling of tact, arose, mumbling about looking after something on the stove, and went off to her kitchen.

  Mr. MacDhui knelt and gathered his daughter to his heart, her head tucked beneath his chin. He held her strongly close to him, yet tenderly so that the love he felt for her would flow from him to her and to that heart of hers, which he could feel now slowly beating against his and which, according to the old doctor, had become broken and needed mending.

  He sent the current of his love to heal her, but found that he was unable to speak to her. The love words would not rise to his lips, for he was a man and now for the first time he understood what Dr. Strathsay had meant. From a woman would have come those sweet and loving words of comfort, “My darling, my precious, my poppet, my bonnie; my little girl, my dearest; I am here. Do not fear; see, I am here with you; I hold you enfolded close to my heart where nothing can harm you, my bonnie, my dear—”

  Why was it these speeches came so hard to a man and so easily to a woman? He groaned with the inward burden of what he could not express to his daughter and after a time put her away from him, leaning her gently against the pillow, stroking her head and hand. Her eyes remained fixed upon his face. He could not fathom the expression in them, but he felt his inadequacy.

  In his mind Mr. MacDhui replaced himself now with the figure of Lori, and at once he saw the gentle inclination of her head as she bent over the bed of the child. It was almost as though she were standing there beside him, so vividly did he remember that half-rueful, half-tender expression at the corners of her mouth. He saw how the copper-red hair would fall upon either side of her shoulders to mingle with the red-gold of Mary Ruadh’s, and he was remembering how she had cradled the injured badger in her arms. He saw his child held there instead and heard the love words that this gentle woman would speak to her.

  Mr. MacDhui sat down by the bedside with a sigh, as the bitterness of his dilemma drove him to the point of despair. For the hundredth time he saw the dream destroyed by the cruelty of reality.

  For Lori was fey, Lori was mad, Lori lived an unnatural life; her eyes looked within rather than without. There were names in the scientific and clever world for the sickness that beset her mind.

  Lori heard voices from heaven and communed with the unseen. Lori had abandoned actuality to live within a myth. Lori had taken the veil. She served not humankind but the animal kingdom. It was the supreme irony that Lori could never be the woman that Dr. Strathsay had prescribed to bring love and affection to a motherless child and fill the heart of a wicked, lonely man who loved her. Mr. MacDhui buried his face in his hands, pressing his fingers into his brow as though to force some solution to come into his brain. When he removed them he saw that Mary Ruadh had gone quietly to sleep.

  He observed now all that Dr. Strathsay had mentioned, the translucence and the pallor, the shadows and hollows, but what wrung his heart most grievously was that most beautiful of all features in the sleeping of children, the mouth. It seemed to him that it had formed into the shape of surrender.

  Mr. MacDhui arose heavily and went out of the room. He thought that he would seek out and have a talk with his friend, Mr. Angus Peddie, minister of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Inveranoch, the inside of which he, MacDhui, had yet to see, or any other. He wished to ask him a question.

  2 1

  The study of the rectory attached to the Presbyterian church was unfamiliar to Andrew MacDhui, and he felt as ill at ease there as a schoolboy.

  Ordinarily nothing would have been simpler than for the veterinary to have dropped in upon the Reverend Angus Peddie at his home next door, as he did frequently for an evening of smoking or arguing and over a pipeful of shag and a glass of beer or two, and to have unburdened himself.

  It was significant of the emotional state in which MacDhui found himself that he was unable to do this and place his dilemma before Peddie on an easygoing, man-to-man basis. Instead he paid his friend a formal afternoon call at his place of business, so to speak, and found himself constrained as any back-country parishioner in unfamiliar clothes and unfamiliar surroundings sitting, bowler hat in hand, on the edge of his chair, waiting for a word with the dominie.

  True, Mr. MacDhui was dressed no differently than ever, in his old tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches; his flaming, unruly hair was hatless, but his spirit was subdued and he did favor the edge of the chair. From there he contemplated the minister sitting behind his desk, on which were piled books and papers, looking somewhat like a Mr. Pickwick in a literary mood, the potted plant standing on its mahogany pedestal in the corner, the tall bookcase, the electric fire beneath the brown mantelpiece, the chessboard with pieces on a small table, the etchings on the walls, and the dark paneling of the walls themselves.

  Peddie, masking his surprise well at seeing him there, had said, “Come in, come in, Andrew, and sit down. No, you do not disturb in the least. The break is welcome and will save my congregation a sermon fifteen minutes too long, for I shall bring it to a close here and now.”

  But when MacDhui had settled himself uneasily on a straight-backed chair a silence fell between them which was not relieved until Fin, the minister’s dyspeptic pug dog, got up out of his basket next to his master’s desk, puffing and wheezing, came over to the veterinary and sat up before him, begging with little paddling movements of his paws.

  There was a dish of bonbons at MacDhui’s elbow and he reached absently for one, popping it into the dog’s mouth. The animal bugged out his eyes with pleasure and fell to enjoying it.

  The Reverend Peddie regarded his friend with a triumphant smile. “There, you see?” he said.

  Even MacDhui had to laugh and, the ice somewhat broken, he made a great show of loading his pipe to enable him to get a grip upon himself and somehow make a beginning. When he had got it drawing he said, “I wanted a few words with you, Angus.”

  Anxious to help him, Peddie tried to read what was on his mind. “Is it that the child is no better? I shall continue to pray for her.”

  Mr. MacDhui said, “Thank you. That is kind of you,” with a kind of stiff formality that the minister was not slow to note and he wished now he had not said it, or that he had waited for MacDhui to speak.

  The veterinary, who had no conception of the meaning of the prayer that arises from the sincere and believing heart, felt a kind of odd resentment at the dominie’s words and at what he considered the implication that the most precious life on earth to him could be turned on or of
f, or regulated through mumbled words of supplication, incantation, or bribery-through-praise. It seemed to him a kind of presumption on the part of the minister that he had connections on high that MacDhui did not and that he was willing to contact them for him. He wished that his friend had not reverted to his profession even though he had come to consult him professionally, and he wished too, now, that he had not come at all, that he had had the strength to persist and try to find within himself the answer to his dilemma.

  Yet, he felt, after a moment, since he was there he might as well make a beginning and so he said, “The diagnosis is still the same. Nothing is wrong and yet—everything is wrong. But that is not why I am here. It is about Lori.”

  This time Mr. Peddie kept his face impassive and roundly placid as he said, “Ah yes. Lori. You said you might be going to pay her a visit. I gather you have done so.”

  Into Mr. MacDhui’s mind came suddenly the recollection of Mr. Peddie’s warning to him. “You may find yourself in the greatest danger—the danger of coming to love God.” He wondered what his friend would say when he learned that it was not God that he, MacDhui, had come to love, but Lori. Aloud he replied, “Yes. I have been there a number of times, as a matter of fact.”

  Mr. Peddie was feeling his way carefully. “And did you accomplish what you set out to do?”

  “It was not necessary. Her—what she was doing had been—misrepresented to me. She is an innocent person and in no way can be said to fall foul of the law.”

  The Reverend Peddie smiled engagingly. “Splendid. I was sure you would see this for yourself.”

  “I was wrong,” MacDhui admitted. “I own it. I—I”—and here he fumbled for words—“I felt that I wished to help her.”

  At the word “help” a gleam of understanding came into the eyes of the minister behind their gold-rimmed spectacles and he leaned forward on his desk, regarding his friend with renewed interest behind which lay just the faintest hint of amusement inspired by an appreciation of the little ironies of life and sympathy for one caught in their toils. He said, “That was good of you,” and did not add as the mischief in him might have prompted him to do, “For ‘help,’ read ‘love.’ ”