Puss in D.C. and Other Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  As she turned back, the glass door slid open. The white-haired man stood in front of them. “Ya know what ya done?” he shouted. “Do you know?” he said more quietly.

  “I know,” Maerleen said.

  “She can’t stay here and she can’t go back down that thread to where she was, not now.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why did you bring her here? Why did you let her—”

  “She does not deserve what would have happened to her where…when she was. There would have been no forgiveness for her. Even if her parents had believed she did nothing wrong, she would always have carried the blame inside herself.” Maerleen knelt next to Addie. “Your brother will be well cared for here. You believe me, do you not?”

  Addie nodded, forcing herself to believe it in spite of the desolation outside the glass door.

  “Then you must go back now, but all by yourself.”

  Addie swallowed. “But he said—” She pointed at the man. “He said—I thought—”

  “Do not think of what he said. Turn around.”

  Addie turned to her right to see a hallway with walls that seemed made of mist. She could barely make out the room at the other end of the hallway, but it appeared to have windows like the ones in her bedroom.

  Maerleen said, “You must walk down that passage, now.”

  “Will you ever come back?” Her eyes were tearing up. “Will you bring Cyril back home, just for a little while—”

  “Go.” A hand pushed her forward. She stumbled into the passage. The windows rushed at her as she slid down the hallway, unable to stop herself. She rolled onto the floor, righted herself, and got to her feet.

  Cyril and Maerleen were only tiny blurred images on the wall, standing at the end of a tunnel, and then they winked out.

  * * * *

  At last Addie got up and stumbled toward her bed. Tears ran down her face; she could no longer hold them back. Cyril could not be gone; he was downstairs watching television with the sound off or playing on the porch with his Lincoln Logs. She fell across the bed, unable to stop crying. Dimly, outside the windows, she heard the sound of a car driving by, and then a voice that sounded like Bobby Renfrew’s calling out to somebody else.

  She wiped her eyes. It had been night only a little while ago, and now there was sunlight outside her windows. She sat up and looked across the room. Cyril’s bed was gone, and in its place stood a small bookcase and a painted chest of drawers.

  “Cyril,” she whispered, and then saw that the green bedroom walls were now yellow. This isn’t my room, she thought, suddenly frightened; Maerleen had sent her somewhere else. She sank to the floor and put her hands over her eyes. She was dreaming; that had to be what was happening. All she had to do was wake up and everything would be the way it was.

  “Addie?”

  She turned her head. Her father stood in the doorway, his tie loosened, his jacket draped over one arm. “I could have sworn—” He shook his head. “Came up to look for you a few minutes ago, and you weren’t here. How’d you get past me?”

  She did not know what to say. For a moment, she had the feeling that someone else was in the room with her and her father. “I was here all the time,” she said, although that wasn’t what she had meant to say. Maerleen took us both away, but she brought me back. That was what she wanted to say. She struggled to recall what the woman had said to her.

  He frowned. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

  She shook her head. The woman had a strange name, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

  “Then come on downstairs. Dinner’s almost ready.” He moved away from the door; she got up and followed him into the hall. The door to the room down the hallway was open; she glanced inside as they passed and saw blue curtains and a Brooklyn Dodgers pennant on the wall.

  She darted into the room. A baseball glove sat on top of a dresser, and a pair of sneakers on top of a blue rug. Through the half-open doorway of the small closet, she glimpsed a couple of pairs of pants draped over hangers. This wasn’t the way this room should look, she thought, but could not remember what it had looked like before.

  “Your brother’s downstairs,” her father said.

  She turned around. “Gary’s downstairs,” her father continued, “and I hope you’re not going to get into a fight with him at dinner. You mother says you two were really going at it this morning.”

  She ran from the room, pushed past him, and headed for the stairs. Her hand gripped the railing as a boy appeared at the bottom of the stairwell; he pulled off a baseball cap to reveal white-blond hair.

  “Cyril,” she whispered. But this boy wasn’t Cyril. A woman in shorts and a sleeveless white shirt appeared next to the boy; her smile was so open and her gaze so steady that it took Addie a few seconds to recognize her mother.

  “Addie,” her mother said, “what’s the matter?”

  Addie stared down at the boy. “You’re not Cyril.” She tried to remember who Cyril was.

  “What are you talking about?” the boy shouted. “I’m Gary, your brother. Or are you too dumb to know?”

  “But then what about…” Addie turned toward her father. “What about the twins?”

  “What twins?” Her father looked really worried now. Addie took a step toward him, then ran past him back to her room.

  She had lost something. She could not escape that thought. Maybe it was still here, somewhere in her room. She dropped to her knees and looked under the bed, but saw only a pair of sandals and a few dust balls. As she stood up, she noticed shadows on the wall. She had seen them so many times before, miniature silhouettes of cars, reflections of the traffic in the street outside her window.

  She sat down on her bed and watched the shadows flicker across the yellow wall.

  “Addie?” Her mother came into the room, trailed by her father and brother. “Is everything all right?”

  She had gone to her room earlier to read; that was coming back to her now. “I’m okay,” she replied.

  “Are you sure?” her mother continued. “You must have been up here all afternoon.”

  “I’m fine,” Addie insisted. “I was going to read for a while, but I must have fallen asleep.” She looked over at the bookcase. She had taken a storybook out of the town library a few days ago; that was the book she had planned to read that afternoon.

  Gary made a face at her, screwing up his eyes and sneering. Their father put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, slugger,” he said to the boy. “Might as well head downstairs and wash up before supper.” The two retreated down the hallway.

  The reflections on the wall had blurred. “Strawberry birdies,” Addie said.

  “What did you say?” her mother asked.

  Addie pointed at the shadows. “Strawberry birdies,” she repeated, not knowing where those words came from, but feeling that they fit the shadows somehow. The sense of something lost came over her again and then faded.

  Afterword to “Strawberry Birdies”

  This story is set in a college town that resembles the Ithaca, New York of my childhood, and the house where Addie and her family live is much like the house my family inhabited. (As a child, I thought of the house as being roomy and was surprised, visiting years later, to see how small it actually was.) That Ithaca of the 1950s seemed scaled to a child; downtown was only a couple of blocks from our house, the school I attended was just down the street, and there were the steep hills and gorges of the Cornell University campus to explore. Ithaca had the virtues of a small town while being more cosmopolitan than most, given Cornell’s large population of foreign students and others from all around the U.S.

  I look back on that Ithaca with some nostalgia, but there were dark spots even in that pleasant place. There was the constant fear of contracting polio; some of my playmates were the kids wearing leg braces and on crutches at a
rehabilitation center near our home. (I was one of the children included in the Francis Field Trial of the Salk polio vaccine, one of the largest medical experiments ever conducted; the first injection made me ill with fever and nausea, so I wasn’t surprised years later to find out I’d been given the actual vaccine and not the placebo.) There were also the Cold War, Senator Joe McCarthy, and the possibility of nuclear war, all of which hung in the background of my childish life even when I was only dimly aware of them.

  The character of Maerleen Loegins was inspired by Mary Poppins—not the Disneyfied depiction of the nanny by Julie Andrews, but the imposing and mysterious woman I first encountered in the P.L. Travers books. Even my family resembled the Banks family of that first volume; there were Jane Banks, the oldest (me), followed by her brother Michael (my brother Scott), and the twins, John and Barbara (my sister and brother Connie and Craig, who were also twins), making it a simple matter for me to transport myself and my own family imaginatively into the world of Mary Poppins. I recall being very disappointed when I finally saw the movie version of Mary Poppins; charming as Julie Andrews was, she didn’t fit my image of the intimidating and sometimes frightening Mary Poppins, and the Banks household had been reduced in that movie to only two children, Jane and Michael.

  The “strawberry birdies” in the story were actual shadows I used to see on the walls inside our house.

  AFTER I STOPPED SCREAMING

  The blonde in the big ape’s hand. Long before you had Rita Hayworth on that bed in a negligée or Marilyn standing over that grate with her skirt billowing up, there were all those pictures and posters and billboards of me, the blonde in the big ape’s hand.

  You asked me why I became so reclusive, why I stayed out of the limelight for so long. Well, I really wasn’t that much of a recluse when I was younger, I did have my friends and activities, and if you think I’m a recluse now, all I can say is that when you get past ninety, you pretty much have to keep closer to home. In my younger days, I also preferred to be around people I knew pretty well, people who were pals and wouldn’t ask me all the usual questions. I would have gotten out and about a lot more if I just could have counted on strangers not to start asking me for the “real” story.

  You know what I mean. Frankly, it was a relief when almost everybody seemed to forget about the whole thing, so all of this interest in the story now is kind of surprising.

  No, I don’t really mind talking to you, not at this point, and maybe it’s time to set the record straight. I think I’m finally old enough and understand enough that I can tell you the real story, or at least my version of the real story.

  I don’t suppose that I really even started putting it all together until years later. Actually, I think the light started to dawn at about the time that my husband and I were celebrating our thirtieth wedding anniversary, which was kind of a miracle in itself, considering how we started out, two kids with no real prospects sailing off on the Impresario’s boat to that creepy island. The early years of our marriage weren’t that easy or happy, for reasons I probably don’t have to mention. The Impresario was paying for my psychoanalysis the whole time my husband and I were living in Manhattan, but I didn’t need an analyst digging around inside my head to know what was bugging me, and if that meant going through the rest of my life with a phobia about apes, well, I could live with that. I never much cared for zoos anyway, but I was starting to develop a phobia about bearded guys with German accents. And I was beginning to realize that if my marriage was going to have any chance of lasting, I’d have to put what happened with that big gorilla and me behind me for good.

  So I did. I avoided thinking about those days at all, just pretended to myself that they never happened, and it helped, believe me. Pretty soon, I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming and my man was able to get a good night’s sleep. But as time went by, and I picked up what you might call a different perspective, I began to see that the Impresario had actually done me a big favor, whether he intended to or not. I’d been around the track a few times, if you know what I mean, and things weren’t going to get any better for me, not during the Depression, anyway. Without the Impresario, I wouldn’t have been on that boat where I met my husband, and I wouldn’t have had a shot later on at a career on Broadway and in pictures, even if that didn’t quite pan out in the end. I wouldn’t have had all those happy years in California, and I guess I don’t really have to explain why we were just as happy to get out of New York. My husband wouldn’t have made all that money in real estate after World War II—it didn’t hurt that he got to know Ronnie Reagan while they were making all those morale boosters for the Army together—and I wouldn’t be sitting here in this ritzy old age home talking to you. And now I’m old enough and I’ve lived long enough to understand what that big ape must have gone through. I can even have some sympathy for the old gorilla.

  Yeah, you’ve got that right. Maybe I was picking up on that from the start, maybe that’s how I was able to survive the whole experience. Things might have been tough for me, but they were a whole lot tougher for that giant ape. He’d been through some pretty hard times long before I ever got to his island.

  Here’s something I only understood later. The Impresario had this nutty idea—people nowadays would call it racist—that the way to capture the big ape was to attract him with some white woman. But in all honesty, a lot of those babes in that African village could have given me a run for my money in the looks department. About the only thing I had going for me there, lookswise, was being a novelty, and that novelty probably would have worn off really fast after a few more weeks in the jungle, when my roots would have started to show and I probably would have picked up one hell of a sunburn. The truth was that, for whatever reason, and maybe it was just plain loneliness, the ape would show up at the village wall, and they’d set out some poor girl or other to keep him away, and then he’d carry her off, probably worrying the whole time about how he was going to take care of her in a place where you’ve got dinosaurs running around, especially if she’s screaming all the time. And then he’d lose her sooner or later, and he’d get even more depressed and lonely, so he’d come back for another babe, and then he’d lose her, too. Some T. rex would grab her, or a pterodactyl would carry her off, or she’d fall off a cliff.

  It had to be depressing, to put it mildly. After a while, he must have felt like he was trapped in one of those nightmares that keeps repeating itself, like the ones I used to discuss with my analyst. He comes back to the village, finds another girl tied up and waiting for him, probably screaming her head off the same way I did, and the folks in the village beating their drums and waving their torches around and just basically telling him to grab the girl and go away. Off he goes, with the poor woman still screaming her head off, and maybe he just wants her to stop screaming. It’s making him feel really inadequate, all that screaming and carrying on—I can tell you that I never knew a guy who didn’t cringe and feel horrible if a gal started screaming whenever he so much as laid a hand on her, unless he was the kind of guy you really didn’t want to know. So here’s the ape, carrying still another girl off to his cave or wherever, and no matter what he does, something awful happens to her. I don’t know how anybody, even a big gorilla, goes through that without becoming seriously traumatized, do you?

  What about his life before that? That’s a good question. I didn’t start sorting that out until after the Impresario came back from his second expedition and I found out that the big gorilla’s son saved his life, not that this good deed did Junior any good. I mean, I didn’t know before then that the big ape had anything like a family life, but obviously he did, and obviously there was what you could call a Mrs. Giant Gorilla around, or there wouldn’t have been any son. Let’s be honest—a big giant female ape should have had a lot more appeal for a big gorilla than a teeny little bottle blonde from New Jersey. For one thing, besides the obvious, namely being a lot closer to his size, she probab
ly would have been able to handle herself in that jungle. Any pterodactyl coming after her would have had his wings pinned in a big hurry. The big guy wouldn’t have had to worry about how he was going to protect her, either, and—here’s something else I probably wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t lived this long—he must have admired her independence. They would have had what the young folks nowadays call an egalitarian relationship. I’m willing to bet that they had a pretty good time in those early years, hanging around the cave and beating up a dino now and then, and then the kid came along.

  Now, much as I wish my husband and I had been able to have some kids of our own, you have to admit that having a kid can affect a marriage, and not always for the better. You know how it goes. The wife’s home with the kid all day while her husband’s out with the guys. Or the kid’s crying all night and nobody can get any sleep, or one parent’s big on whipping the kid into shape and the other one’s reading Dr. Spock or whatever nice old geezer is writing about babies these days. It could be any number of things, but my guess is that the ape and his mate had a big falling-out, and it probably involved child care issues as they’d put it nowadays, and the missus finally up and left and took the kid with her. All I know is that I didn’t see any little gorillas running around while I was there, and I think I would have noticed even if I wasn’t exactly making careful observations, but obviously Junior had to be on that island somewhere or he couldn’t have saved the Impresario later on. And a little gorilla wouldn’t have been any safer there without a big gorilla to look out for him than I would have been. So since the big ape wasn’t looking out for the kid, his kid’s mother had to be.

  He must have been thinking of her. Maybe that’s why he went to the village in the first place—maybe he thought she was hiding out somewhere nearby. I can’t imagine what he might have been thinking when the villagers first started tying up women outside the wall for him, but by then he might have really needed some female companionship, even if it was kind of on the small scale. And maybe he was so mad at his mate for leaving that he kind of liked the idea of having some tiny little woman around who had to look up to him. He wouldn’t be the first.