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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

  Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

  Winner of the Paris Review’s Hadada Award

  “The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

  “One of America’s most talented writers.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Consistently excellent.” —The New York Times

  “Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.” —School Library Journal

  “Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox’s brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

  “Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —The New Yorker

  “As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox’s prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn, New York magazine

  “Fox’s achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

  “Fox has little of Roth’s self-consciousness, less of Bellow’s self-importance, and none of Updike’s self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

  “There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by homage or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb, The Boston Review

  “Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel, BOMB

  One-Eyed Cat

  A Newbery Honor Book

  ALA Best of the Best

  ALA Notable Book

  ALA Best Book for Young Adults

  A Horn Book Fanfare Selection

  Booklist Editors’ Choice

  International Reading Association Teachers’ Choice

  Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts

  Winner of the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee Award

  Winner of the Christopher Award

  International Board on Books for Young People Honor

  Jane Addams Children’s Book Award

  New York Times Outstanding Children’s Book of the Year

  “A deep and demanding psychological novel.” —School Library Journal

  “This riveting tale is spun with an eloquent simplicity that belies the skill of its telling. Fox brings a penetrating compassion and understanding to finely textured characters, young and old.” —Booklist, starred review

  “Tautly structured, perceptive, compelling.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, starred review

  “In a rare, remarkable novel for children, the pure clarity of the prose, its reticence, and its concrete sensual imagery recall the literary style of Willa Cather.” —The Horn Book Magazine

  “A beautifully unfolded story with memorable characters, a firm sense of the tides of family life, and an unexpected revelation before the apposite ending.” —Kirkus Reviews

  One-Eyed Cat

  Paula Fox

  For my sons

  GABRIEL and ADAM

  and for my brothers

  JAMES and KEITH

  CONTENTS

  I

  Sunday

  II

  The Gun

  III

  The Old Man

  IV

  The Cat

  V

  The Strength of Life

  VI

  Christmas

  VII

  Disappearances

  VIII

  Cat’s Moon

  About the Author

  There was a child went forth every day,

  And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

  And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

  Or for many years or stretching cycle of years.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  I

  Sunday

  Ned Wallis was the minister’s only child. The Congregational Church where the Reverend James Wallis preached stood on a low hill above a country lane a mile beyond the village of Tyler, New York. Close by the parsonage, a hundred yards or so from the church, was a small cemetery of weathered tombstones. Some had fallen over and moss and ivy covered them. When Ned first learned to walk, the cemetery was his favorite place to practice. There, his father would come to get him after the members of the congregation had gone home to their Sunday dinners. There, too, his mother often sat on a tumbled stone and watched over him while his father stood at the great church door speaking to each and every person who had attended service that day. That was long ago, before his mother had become ill.

  Just past the church was a low, dark, musty-smelling barn where people had stabled their horses in the days before there were automobiles. In bad weather, it was still used by ancient Mr. Deems, who drove his rattling buckboard and skinny chestnut mare all the way from his farm in the valley to the church and into the barn. And when Ned grew older, he and a few of the children from the early Sunday school class played there, hiding and shouting and scaring each other but keeping their distance from Mr. Deems’s mare, who was known to be cross tempered. On warm days the voices of the choir—especially the high tremulous voices of the oldest singers—would float into the darkness of the barn like the thin, sweet aroma of meadow flowers. The children would pause in their play and listen until old Mrs. Brewster, who held the last note of a hymn till her breath ran out and she tottered into her seat, fell silent.

  The Wallis family didn’t live in the parsonage, although they could have and it would not have cost them a penny. Their house was fifteen miles from Tyler. It had been built by Ned’s grandfather in 1846, nearly eighty years before Ned was born. Like the church, it stood on a hill. From its windows there was a view of the Hudson River. This view was one of the reasons the Reverend Wallis did not want to move.

  It was a big, ailing old house. When too many things went wrong with it—the furnace cut off when it wasn’t supposed to, the cistern overflowed, the roof leaked—or when Ned’s mother’s illness grew worse so that Reverend Wallis could hardly bear to leave her to take care of his many pastoral duties, then he would cry out that they would have to go and live in the parsonage, such a mean, small house, so far from the heart-lifting sight of the great river. Ned knew that his father loved the house that was such a trouble to take care of, too far from his church, too costly for a country minister’s salary.

  When Ned followed his father into the church on Sundays, he was always startled by the vast airy openness above the aisles and rows of pews, and by the immense height of the windows which flowed with light, and by the many dark gold-colored pipes of the organ which rose behind the pulpit. No matter how often he counted them, he always ended up with a different number. He knew every part of the church, from the cellar where the huge furnace glowed in cold weather like a steam locomotive, to the basement where the Sunday school classes
and meetings and study clubs were held, and on special occasions, where church suppers were spread out on long tables, all the way up the curving narrow steps to the gallery above the choir. Perhaps he was always surprised by the bigness of the church because he was used to thinking of it as another room in his house.

  One Sunday in late September, a few days before his eleventh birthday, Ned was leaning back in the front pew where he usually sat. The red velvet pew cushion, so comforting in winter, was making the backs of his legs itch. The August heat had held on and the sky was pale with it. Papa’s voice, as he preached his sermon, seemed to come from a great distance. Someone coughed. Someone else rustled the pages of a hymnbook. A cloud of drowsiness dropped over Ned like a cloth. He tried to keep himself awake by imagining what it would be like to live on the ocean for all of your life. That was what had happened to Philip Nolan in The Man Without a Country: he had been exiled to a ship. Ned had just finished the book that morning before he went downstairs to have breakfast with Papa. The thought of breakfast woke Ned up completely. It reminded him of Mrs. Scallop.

  Until two months ago, Sunday breakfasts had been quiet. Ned’s Papa always wore his amethyst tiepin in his black silk tie, his black trousers with the satin stripe down each side and the cutaway jacket with back panels that looked like a beetle’s folded wings, and he had his Sunday look, thinking about his sermon, Ned knew. The only noise had been their spoons hitting the sides of the cereal bowls. Sometimes Ned would gaze up at the Tiffany-glass lamp shade with its various panels depicting wild animals. Ned’s favorite was the camel who stood in a brown glass desert which appeared to stretch for miles when the light was turned on. But that quietness had been shattered by the coming of Mrs. Scallop, whose voice now intruded in the dining room every morning, as sharp and grinding as the woodcutter’s saw when he came in the spring to thin out the pines which grew along the north side of the Wallises’ property.

  Mrs. Scallop was the third housekeeper they had had in a year, and in Ned’s opinion, the worst. She would stand at the table talking to them, her hands resting on her stomach. She didn’t need questions or answers or any kind of conversation at all to keep going. Ned noticed how Papa’s brow grew furrowed with lines, though he was as polite and kindly to Mrs. Scallop as he was to everyone else. On their way to church that morning in the old Packard car, Ned had said, “Mrs. Scallop talks to our chairs when we’re not there.”

  Papa said, “She’s very good to your mother. Poor woman. She’s had a hard life—losing her husband only a year after they were married and having to support herself all these years.”

  Ned knew he would say something like that. But earlier, when he’d told his mother his joke about Mrs. Scallop speaking to furniture, she’d laughed and told him Mrs. Scallop was frightened of groans and whispers. “If I whisper, ‘Leave the napkin on the tray,’ Mrs. Scallop disappears instantly,” she said. Ned had started to smile. Then he couldn’t—he’d thought of his mother’s illness, which was rheumatoid arthritis, and how it really did make her groan, or so weak she could only whisper.

  What puzzled Ned most about Mrs. Scallop were her sudden unexplained silences. They were far worse than her talking; they were angry silences, and the anger was even in her hands which she pressed so hard against her stomach that Ned could see white spots on her skin. He could never figure out what had set her off.

  One day she would call him her darling boy and hug him every chance she got. But the next morning, she would stare at him silently with her small eyes that were like two blue crayon dots. Her nostrils would flare slightly, her frizzy hair would look electrified. What had he done, he would wonder, to make her so furious? But she never explained. Ned decided that the worst thing you could do to a person was not to say why you were angry with him.

  Papa preached about only ten commandments, but Mrs. Scallop had hundreds of them and she rapped them out like a woodpecker drilling away at a tree trunk.

  “If you don’t dry your toes well after your bath, you’ll get appendicitis,” she warned him. “If you drop a fork, you’ll have bad news before sunset,” she said. Once she had snatched the book he was reading right out of his hands, studied it closely for a second, then exclaimed, “What piffle! Talking animals, for mercy’s sake! Your brains will go soft if you read such nonsense!”

  Still, he preferred her woodpecker rapping to those sullen, accusing silences.

  This morning had started out as a “darling boy” day. She’d described the birthday cake she was going to make for Ned on Wednesday. It would amaze him. Hadn’t she made her first cake when she was a tiny thing of five? Hadn’t her mother taught her good? Didn’t she know how to make the best cakes for miles around? His eleventh birthday, she said, was very, very important. After you passed eleven, you had to start learning everything. If you didn’t know everything by the time you were thirteen, you never got another chance.

  “Well, Mrs. Scallop, I think we have more time than that,” Papa had said gently.

  Ned had excused himself from the table and gone upstairs to say goodbye to his mother.

  “Mrs. Scallop says I have to learn everything before I’m thirteen,” he had said. Mama was in her wheelchair over by the bay windows.

  “I’m afraid that’s what Mrs. Scallop did,” Mrs. Wallis said, smiling at Ned. He saw at once that she was feeling well today. There were mornings when he had no sooner entered her room than he turned right around and left, days when she was bent over the tray table attached to the wheelchair as if a wind had pinned her there, a wind that kept her from sitting up. Those were the mornings when her fingers were as twisted as the roots of pine trees, and he would tiptoe away, feeling as if his own bones were turning into water.

  “She’s going to make me a birthday cake Wednesday,” he’d told her.

  “We’ll have to grant that she bakes well,” his mother said. “Although by the time she’s finished a cake, by the time she tells you how absolutely wonderful it is, you hardly have any appetite left.” She had turned to look out the window. “Look,” she said. “It’s so beautiful today. The haze hasn’t formed yet. I do believe we can see all the way to West Point. I always wonder about that little island in the river. Do you suppose anyone lives on it?”

  “You told me a story about it once,” Ned had said, thinking his mother found any kind of day beautiful when she wasn’t in pain.

  She had laughed and exclaimed, “Oh, Ned! You remember that? You weren’t much past your fifth birthday. I was still walking around. Yes … I made up a long story about an old man and his cat.”

  “Uncle Lightning,” Ned said.

  “Yes!”

  “The cat’s name was Aura.”

  “Aurora,” she said. “That means ‘goddess of the dawn.’”

  She fell silent and he looked past her through the window at the river flowing between the mountains.

  “Eleven is a good age to be,” she said slowly. “I came to these windows just as the sun rose that morning in September, 1924, when you were born. It was a clear day, like today. Not so warm though. I wasn’t thinking about the view. I loved it but I was so used to it I often looked at the mountains and the river and the sky without seeing them. That dawn, I was wondering who you were. And then, about fourteen hours later, you arrived.”

  He bent to kiss her goodbye and saw close up the thick braid of her fair hair that was coiled into a bun at the nape of her neck.

  He had once seen Papa braiding her hair. He had stood in the dark upper hall and looked through her door as his Papa stood next to her wheelchair with the hair in his hands like a great soft rope, braiding it quickly, pinning it at her neck. Papa had then rested his cheek on her head and Ned, suddenly shy and uneasy, had gone on downstairs.

  “We must try and be philosophical about Mrs. Scallop,” his mother had said. “She is a good cook, and your father’s mind is at ease when he must be away.”

  By philosophical, Ned knew that his mother meant they had to remind themselves the
re was a bright side to Mrs. Scallop’s presence in the house. It was hard to find anything bright about Mrs. Scallop, only red and inflamed, like skin around a splinter. Even the rag rugs she was always braiding were without a touch of brightness, just dull and rusty-looking.

  Before she came, the Wallis family had eaten a lot of canned salmon and canned peas. The church ladies had always tried to help out, sending hampers of Sunday dinner home with Papa. But the ladies tended to be partial to desserts. Large amounts of cakes and pies and cupcakes sat around in the pantry all week, crumbling and growing staler day by day and nearly curing Ned’s sweet tooth for good.

  There had been other housekeepers over the years, but they seemed ghostly compared to Mrs. Scallop. Ned couldn’t remember what sort of meals they had made. He reminded himself, too, how relieved he was at night by the knowledge of Mrs. Scallop’s presence in her bedroom off the back staircase, how comforting it was when Papa had to attend a meeting of the church deacons or visit a sick parishioner.

  Even though he always lay awake until he heard the sound of the Packard’s wheels on the gravel of the driveway, he wasn’t frightened the way he had been so often when he was alone with his mother, imagining what would happen if the house caught on fire, or if she had a terrible attack of pain. What would he have done to help her except to get the operator on the telephone and ask her to get help? Papa had taught him to use the telephone long before he could even spell his own name.

  One thing he was sure about was that if the house caught on fire while she was there, Mrs. Scallop would be able to carry both him and his mother down the stairs and out the door. She was like someone in the funny papers. He was trying to think of the name of that character when he heard the beginning of the doxology: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow …”

  He saw Papa step back from the pulpit. He remembered now who Mrs. Scallop was like in the funnies—Powerful Katinka, who could pick up a whole trolley car!

  He realized he was still holding a nickel in his hand. The deacons had forgotten to pass him the collection plate today. As the doxology died away, an elderly heartfelt voice quavered on. It belonged to Mrs. Brewster, with whom he and his father were having dinner today.