MAGICATS II

by Gardner Dozoi

  “Of course,” said Cousin Andromache, “my sweet little Pussy is just a little unreasonable when she thinks someone is trying to harm me. A couple of weeks ago, the newsboy threw the paper just as I was coming out the door. It hit me on the shoulder. It didn’t really hurt, but Pussy was after him like a flash. If he hadn’t pedaled his bicycle at top speed, I really don’t know what would have happened to him. Now the boy won’t return and I have to go out every morning and buy the paper at a newsstand. It is comfortable to know, though, that I’m protected from any mugger or burglar.”

  At the words, “mugger or burglar,” Little Pussy seemed to be reminded of me, for she turned to look at me and her eyes blazed with the fires of Hell.

  It seemed to me I saw what had happened. After all, hate is negative love. Pussy had had a mild hatred for everything and everyone but herself and, just possibly, Cousin Andromache. To increase Pussy’s love for Andromache, Azazel, following the dictates of the Law of Conservation of Emotion, had to withdraw love from all other objects. Since that love was already negative, it grew more negative than ever. And since Azazel had added love with no sparing hand, the other loves grew much more negative. In short. Pussy now hated everyone and everything with an extravagant hatred that had strengthened and enlarged her muscles, sharpened her teeth and claws, and turned her into a killing machine.

  Cousin Andromache chattered on. “Last week,” she said, “Pussy and I were out for a morning stroll and we met Mr. Walsingham with his Doberman pinscher. I had every intention of avoiding him and crossing the street, but the dog had seen Pussy and snarled at the little innocent creature. Pussy didn’t seem to mind, but it frightened me—I don’t like dogs at all—and I’m afraid I let out a small shriek. That activated dear little Pussy’s protective instinct, and she fell on the dog at once. There was no hope of separating them, and the dog, I understand, is still at the vet’s. Mr. Walsingham is trying to have Pussy declared a dangerous animal, but of course it was the dog that took the initiative and Pussy was merely acting in my defense.”

  She hugged Pussy as she said that, placing her face in actual contact with the cat’s canines, and with no perceptible nervousness. And then she got to the real reason for the invitation to lunch.

  She simpered horribly and said, “But I called you here to give you some news I felt I should tell you personally and not on the telephone—I have a gentleman caller.”

  “A what!” I jumped slightly, and Pussy at once rose and arched its back. I quickly froze.

  I have since thought it out. It seems clear that the sensation of being loved—even if only by a cat out of Golgotha—had softened Cousin Andromache’s sinewy heart and made her ready to gaze with eyes of affection on some poor victim. And who knows? Perhaps the consciousness of being loved had changed her inner being to the point of making her seem marginally toothsome to someone particularly dim of vision and particularly lacking in taste.

  But that was a later analysis. At the time Cousin Andromache broke the news, my keen mind quickly grasped the vital point—my prosperous relative might possibly have someone else to whom to leave her cash and possessions.

  My first impulse was to rise from the seat, seize Cousin Andromache, and shake some sense of family responsibility into her. My second impulse, following a millisecond later, was not to move a muscle. Pussy’s hate-filled eye was on me.

  “But, Cousin Andromache,” I said, “you always told me that if any fellow came lollygagging around you, you’d show him! Why not let Pussy show him? That will fix him.”

  “Oh, no, Hendrik is such a nice man and he loves cats, too. He stroked Pussy, and Pussy let him. That’s when I knew he was all right. Pussy is a good judge of character.”

  I suppose even Pussy would have trouble matching the look of hatred I let her have.

  “In any case,” said Cousin Andromache, “Hendrik is coming over tonight and I believe he will propose that we formalize conditions by getting married. I wanted you to know.”

  I tried to say something, but couldn’t. I tell you I felt as though I had been thoroughly emptied of my internal organs and I was nothing but hollow skin.

  She went on, “I want you also to know, Cousin George, that Hendrik is a retired gentleman, who is quite well-off. It is understood between us that, if I predecease him, none of my small savings will go to him. They will go to you, dear Cousin George, as the person who turned Pussy into a loving and efficient companion and protector for me.”

  Someone had turned the sun and the daylight back on again and all my internal organs were in place once more. It occurred to me, in the merest trice, that if Hendrik predeceased Cousin Andromache, his estate would be very likely added to hers, and would also eventually come to me.

  I said ringingly, “Cousin Andromache. Your money does not concern me. Only your love and your future happiness do. Marry Hendrik, be happy, and live forever. That’s all I ask.”

  I said it with such sincerity, old fellow, that I came within this much of convincing myself I meant it.

  ###

  And then, that evening—

  I wasn’t there, of course, but I found out about it later. Hendrik—seventy, if he was a day, a little over five feet tall and pushing a hundred and eighty pounds in weight—came to call.

  She opened the door for him, and skipped skittishly away. He threw his arms wide, called out, “My love!” advanced heavily, slipped on the throw-rug, went hurtling forward into Cousin Andromache feet-first, and bowled her over.

  That was all Pussy needed. She knew an attack on her mistress when she saw one. By the time the screaming Andromache pulled the screaming Pussy off screaming Hendrik, it was too late for any hope of a romantic marriage proposal that night. It was indeed very nearly too late for anything at all that would involve Hendrik.

  Two days later, I visited him at the hospital at Cousin Andromache’s hysterical request. He was still bandaged to the eyebrows and a team of doctors were discussing the various possible strategies of skin-grafting.

  I introduced myself to Hendrik, who wept copiously, drenching his bandages, and begged me to tell my fair relative that this was a visitation upon him for being unfaithful to his first wife, Emmeline, dead these seventeen years, and for even dreaming of marrying anyone at all.

  “Tell your cousin,” he said, “we will always be the dearest of friends, but I dare not ever see her again, for I am but flesh and blood and the sight of her might arouse loving thoughts and I would then once more be attacked by a grizzly bear.”

  I carried the sad news to Cousin Andromache, who took to her bed at once, crying out that through her doing, the best of men had been permanently maimed—which was undoubtedly true.

  The rest, old man, is unalloyed tragedy. I would have sworn that Cousin Andromache was incapable of dying of a broken heart, but a team of specialists maintained that that was exactly what she proceeded to do. That was sad, I suppose, but the unalloyed tragedy I refer to was that she had had time to alter her will.

  In the new will, she expressed her great affection for me and her certainty that I was far too noble to concern myself over a few pennies so that she left her entire estate of $300,000, not to me, but to her lost love, Hendrik, hoping it would make up to him for the suffering and the medical bills he had incurred because of her.

  All this was expressed in terms so affecting that the lawyer who read the will to me wept uncontrollably and so, as you can well imagine, did I.

  However, I was not entirely forgotten. Cousin Andromache stated in her will that she left me something she knew I would value far more than the paltry dross of cash. In short, she had left me Pussy.

  ###

  George just sat there, staring numbly at nothingness, and I couldn’t help saying, “Do you still have Pussy?”

  He started, focused on me with an effort, and said, “No, not exactly. The very day I received her, she was trampled by a horse.”

  “By a horse!”

  “Yes. The horse died of its woun
ds the next day. A shame, for it was an innocent horse. It’s fortunate, on the whole, that no one had seen me open Pussy’s cage and shake her into the horse’s stall.”

  His eyes glazed over again, and his lips mouthed, silently: Three—hundred—thousand—dollars!

  Then he turned to me and said, “So can you lend me a tenner?”

  What could I do?

  The Boy Who Spoke Cat

  Ward Moore

  Parents are sometimes vain enough, or naive enough, or whimsical enough to believe that they can actually understand children and cats . . . they are usually wrong, as the following sprightly, delightful, and almost unknown story—which comes down squarely on the side of nurture in the old “nature or nurture” argument—amply demonstrates.

  The late Ward Moore had his most profound impact on the science fiction field with his famous novel Bring the Jubilee, which is certainly a strong contender—along with other classics such as L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, Keith Roberts’s Pavane, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle—for the title of the best Alternate Worlds novel ever written. Moore was not a prolific writer, and produced only a few other novels and a handful of short stories, but they included Greener Than You Think, an early ecological-catastrophe novel; Joyleg, written in collaboration with Avram Davidson, a comic novel about an immortal Civil War veteran; and “Lot” and “Lot’s Daughter,” two of the strongest atomic war stories of the ’50s. Moore’s other books include Caduceus Wild, written with Robert Bradford, and the mainstream novel Breathe the Air Again.

  * * *

  Like everybody else, I suppose, I’ve always thought the things I did were ordinary and normal—like having my first baby at nineteen and my second at forty-three—but I hope I’ve never been rigid about it or set myself up as a standard from which all deviation is unnatural. If other women prefer to have children at different intervals, it’s perfectly all right with me. On the other hand, Stephanie was upset—perhaps horrified would not be too strong a word—when she heard about Ben. (Not that we knew he was to be Ben then; he might as well have been Suzy. Or both, though twins don’t run in either Jack’s family or mine.) In spite of my protest she was washing the dishes—I’m strictly a just-before-meals dishwasher myself—in her scientific, no-lost-motion way, while I kept coaxing or shooing the cats out of the kitchen. Ever since she was little, Stephanie has disliked cats, which is odd; for Jack and I have always enjoyed their company, and several usually let us share our home with them. Stephanie has a nicely groomed cocker spaniel for her children.

  “But Mother! You’re too old!”

  Obviously I wasn’t, but there was no use pointing out that gravidity and senility are mutually exclusive. In Stephanie’s twenty-three-year-old eyes, I was ready for a wheelchair, or ought to be. She is a dear girl, a good wife (so far as I can tell), a wonderful mother, and an efficient housekeeper. She loves orderliness and punctuality and recipes without surprises. I remember the time I put soy sauce in a batch of cookies (they came out with a really haunting taste): Stephanie could no more have done that than appear in public without lipstick or have the sort of baby Ben turned out to be. Make no mistake: I dote in the approved way on my grandchildren. Stephanie, even when she was tiny, was never so clean, well-behaved, or fed such a properly high-protein diet as Peter and Ann. Anyway, “Grandmother” connotes, if not infirmity, at least a certain dignity and retirement incompatible with what the ads call “anticipating.”

  I picked up the gray tomcat—not the one with white feet, that’s his father, but the pure gray all over—and put him outdoors. He had been looking as if he were about to bound up onto the drainboard for a friendly visit. He was offended by such unexpected discourtesy, and made an elaborate show of being engrossed in some wild mustard brought up by the last rain and growing rubbery and lush just beyond the kitchen door.

  The canyon was at its best this time of year, I thought, looking up at the hills washed green, with patches of pale blue where the greasewood blossomed. Already yucca were shooting up the spears which would open into belled pagodas. I smelled the air scented with still damp earth, germinating seeds and bursting buds. People who say there’s no sharp difference in the southern California seasons must live in air conditioned vaults and not know a live oak from an elderberry bush.

  “Besides, it’s so complicated,” she went on, whisking the knives and forks through the rinse water. “The children will have an aunt or uncle younger than themselves. Oh, Mother, I’m sorry to be behaving this horrible way. What does Father say?”

  I know Stephanie has always believed Jack would have been a good solid citizen in a double-breasted blue suit if I hadn’t encouraged him to follow his impulses. She couldn’t have been more than nine when we went to live on the houseboat so he could grow culture pearls. “Why doesn’t Father ever do something where he goes to work at the same time every day inside a building, like other fathers?” she had asked earnestly. “I’m sure he doesn’t really want to do these different things; you oughtn’t to let him.” The funny thing was that Jack was reasonably successful with the pearls before he decided to move on to Culver City and work as a movie extra—for which he grew a black beard I’ve always been sorry he shaved off. Unwilling to shake her faith, I thought up something sedate and innocuous and suppressed his actual bawdy comment. One shock a day was enough for Stephanie.

  “Anyway, now you’ll give up this wild adventure and move back to civilization, of course.”

  “I don’t think so, dear. Your father’s always wanted a place like this, and I have a feeling he’ll enjoy goat farming another four or five years before he starts sending for pamphlets and manuals on something else. Now that he’s cleaned out the old well and re-roofed the house and fixed the barn, it would be silly to give it up just because we’re going to increase and multiply along with the goats and chickens and rabbits.”

  “Oh, Mother!”

  Stephanie goes to church, I don’t—that is, not regularly—but it is she who always finds biblical language too outspoken.

  “I’ll probably come in town to have the baby; I don’t want to be annoyingly rugged or too smugly pioneering.”

  “But you can’t raise a baby on a ranch.”

  “Why not? I raised one in an abandoned cannery, with quite satisfactory results. And goat’s milk is just the thing for babies. If we’re fifty miles from a clinic or pediatrician”—I knew this would come up next—“why, we have a phone, and a car your father keeps going, and . . . Goodness, Stephanie, don’t start worrying so soon.”

  People like my daughter are disconcertingly right just often enough to keep one respectful of convention and conservatism. I began having difficulties with Ben shortly after this visit; my blood pressure wasn’t whatever it was supposed to be, and all sorts of poisons chased themselves through my veins. I had to give up salt and smoking and, which was much harder, more than one cup of coffee; and the doctor suppressed the anxiety in his voice just enough to make me careful without scaring me too badly. I had to move in with Stephanie three months before the baby was born, leaving Jack all alone to take care of the livestock and be company for the cats. For the first time in my life I had leisure to read Finnegans Wake, but at that I didn’t get beyond page 44. I would have done better with Gene Stratton Porter.

  Little Ben certainly justified the headshakings and duckings that went on behind a curtain of cooing and joyful exclamation. In the scriptural phrase, my bowels yearned over him; he was so sad and puny. Sad in appearance, I mean, for there was vitality in the scrawny body, apparently composed of too much skin and too many bones. This vitality flashed in his smile even at an age when smiles are supposed to be only signs of air in the stomach.

  It didn’t seem possible he could grow into the disproportionately large hands and feet, or that his fragile neck would ever support his heavy head. He was so clearly the child of parents too old for plump and healthy babies that I had a wretched sense of guilt for having borne him, whi
ch made me all the more fiercely determined that he must survive.

  There was no question the odds were greatly against him. He couldn’t keep food down, no matter what formula we tried. There was a moment—an anxiously hopeful week—when he assimilated the milk from a particular goat and gained priceless ounces, but then his stomach rejected this also. Something was wrong with his insides, something which could only be remedied by probing and cutting and rearranging.

  The terrified hour of surgery and the doubting, tremulous days that followed passed; Ben’s vitality triumphed over the shock, the starvation, the debilitated body. He drank eagerly, earnestly, as though he could never be quite sure of making up for the long deprivation and must get every drop while the miracle of eating and retaining lasted. As our fears slowly retreated and we dared to delight in his progress, he began to change before our eyes. The frail arms rounded; the legs, no longer drawn up protectively, kicked out with vigor. Fuzzy baldness gave way to lank blond hair, not particularly handsome perhaps, but welcomed as an indication—at least I took it as an indication—that there was nourishment now for luxury growths like eyebrows and fingernails without robbing heart or lungs.

  His face filled out, his brown eyes—so light as to be almost hazel—no longer bulged like a choleric old man’s. Sometimes shielded by the long baby lashes dropped demurely, more often they looked with intense curiosity on everything around him. Only the smile was least changed; recognizably the same as in the days of his struggle to stay alive. It was a grave smile, happy yet reserved, the smile of one willing but not quite ready to trust entirely.

  He ate, he learned to roll over, to sit up, to pull himself erect, to creep. He ate, became chubby, raged when he was wet or hungry, slept angelically. Jack and I spent hours simply looking at him with admiration, like very young parents. Even Stephanie said he was a good baby, a healthy baby, a lovely baby—though, of course, he did seem to be a little backward learning to walk.