One-Eyed Cat Page 3

  “Well, Ned,” she would say, turning her gaze away from the windows and looking at him. Some days she would smile very faintly, and he would know she was feeling bad, that that smile was all she could manage, that she had to be very careful not to move, careful the way he was with her cup of tea, so that something in her would not spill over. As far as anyone knew, she wouldn’t get better; she would have good days and bad days—that was all.

  There were nights when his parents’ voices awoke him. Hers would be high and anguished, his father’s, steady and persuasive, the way he sounded from the pulpit in church. As Ned lay listening, his room luminous with star shine or moonlight or else as dark as a well, a darkness as thick as fur pressing against his face, he knew that pain had awaked her and that his father was trying to persuade it away.

  When they had fallen silent and he couldn’t get back to sleep, he often walked through the house. Since Mrs. Scallop had come, he was nervous about going up the narrow splintery stairs in the back hall which led to the attic. Yet there was something thrilling about his passage there, too, a chance he might dislodge an old National Geographic from a heap in the dusty corner of a stair, or trip and bang his big toe, or kick over a box with a thousand old buttons in it that would cascade down the stairs right to Mrs. Scallop’s threshold and scare her out of her sleep! The very thought of exploding her awake made him shudder and laugh at the same time.

  In the attic, he would feel his way among the huge old trunks and boxes, the piles of books and magazines and broken furniture, to one of the small windows from which he could see the river if it was a clear night. As he stood there on tiptoe, gripping the unfinished attic windowsill in his hands, he felt as if he were the only person awake in all the great, empty night.

  He would go back down the stairs and walk through the spare bedroom, past his mother’s room, the small room off it where his father slept, past the hall mirror and down the stairs and into the living room with its dark wallpaper pattern of pussy willows which his grandmother, dead before he was born, had chosen, and by then his eyes were used to the dark and he could make out the glimmer of the silvery catkins. He would go into the dining room and touch the glass camel on the Tiffany shade, pass into the pantry with its smell of stale cake and sour mop and withered apples, into the big kitchen where the cracked old linoleum might nip at his bare feet like red ants. Before he went upstairs, he would pause in his father’s study, testing the floorboards until he found the one that creaked. Then he would be ready to go back to his bed, to sleep.

  Ned was able to visit his mother almost every day, even if it was only for a minute or two. At first, he would have a conversation with her that was not so different from the ones he had with other grownups, his teacher, Miss Jefferson, or members of his father’s congregation like the Brewsters. If he could spend a good, long time with her, the conversation would change. He would get a little stool and take it next to the wheelchair and sit down on it. He would tell her what he had done that day, what he had seen, and even what he had thought. That was what she seemed most interested in.

  When he brought her wildflowers in the spring and summer, she told him the names of each one. If he found an odd stone, she could name what minerals were in it. If he described a bird, she could sometimes tell him its name. When that was done, the flowers put aside with the stone, she would ask him what he thought.

  “What’s outside of everything?” he asked her once.

  “The earth?”

  “I mean the sky. What’s outside of the sky and the stars?”

  “No one knows,” she said.

  “There must be something,” he said. “There can’t be nothing, can there?”

  “Your father would say God,” she said.

  “What would you say?” he asked, a little troubled and interested that she had a different idea than his father.

  “The thought of it is too strange to fit inside my brain,” she said. “Maybe it’s like those dolls Uncle Hilary brought you back from Hungary when you were little. Do you remember? There must have been ten of them, each fitting inside the other until the smallest one, which was no bigger than your fingernail. In the universe, perhaps the dolls go on forever, getting larger and larger.”

  He always knew when she was getting tired. He didn’t know when he’d begun to learn how to tell. He would see a slight tightening of a muscle in her cheek; her shoulders would stoop. He’d get up from the stool then and kiss her cheek that was as soft as the flannel of his oldest pajamas. There was something clothlike about her skin. It made him sad for a moment though he didn’t know why.

  Often he didn’t think about the strangeness of his mother being an invalid. But when he went to visit a school friend, or spent the afternoon with a boy from the Sunday school when his father had extra church business to take care of after services, he would be astonished at the great noise and thundering in the house, at his friend shouting, “Mom!” and banging doors and slamming windows and thumping up and down stairs. It was so different at home. He couldn’t remember when he had learned to walk softly but he was pretty sure no one could make less noise than he did. If he brought someone home to play with—that did not happen often—they stayed outside or, if it was raining, on the porch.

  “When did you get sick?” Ned asked Mama once when the conversation part was finished and they were really talking. He had just touched the skirt of her dress; she always wore bright, pretty dresses.

  “When you were about five years old,” she had answered. “But I think the sickness had been coming on for a long while.”

  “Before that, could you run fast?”

  “Yes, I could run and run. And I rode my horse, Cosmo. I could pick you up and swing you into the air.”

  “Then—” he began.

  “Then the ax fell,” she said.

  The ax fell, he repeated her words to himself now, as Mama opened her eyes and turned to look at him. She smiled. She had been like a tree, he thought, and then was cut down.

  Mrs. Scallop didn’t cook during her time off. One Sunday after Ned had finished his bowl of cereal and huckleberries, he had asked her what she was going to eat for supper. “Mrs. Scallop,” she had replied, speaking of herself in the third person as she frequently did, “never eats supper on Sunday.”

  Papa made omelets that evening and sliced up some tomatoes, which he sprinkled with sugar much to Uncle Hilary’s consternation. “Why is America afraid of olive oil?” he asked loudly, placing his hand on his forehead as though he had a headache. Papa smiled and didn’t seem troubled by Uncle Hilary’s question. Ned thought he would have been troubled if he’d seen Uncle Hilary winking across the table at Ned while Papa had his eyes closed and was saying grace.

  After supper, Uncle Hilary and Papa sat in the living room talking and Ned lay on the floor looking at the funny papers. He always read them in the same place, between the radio and the library table. On top of the radio was a bronze sculpture of a lion, his paw raised over the head of a tiny mouse that was looking up at him, “fearlessly,” Papa had said. Ned wasn’t so sure about that. On the oak library table were folded newspapers which Papa kept for a week before throwing them away, a silver letter opener which had nearly turned black with tarnish, a stack of recent National Geographics, a magnifying glass and a pair of library scissors inlaid with mother of pearl. Ned loved the oak table and everything that was on it. When he finished the funnies, he swung himself over to it and sat up, leaning against one of its thick legs. Papa was saying that they did lead a plain life compared to Uncle Hilary’s.

  “There’s nothing wrong with a plain life,” Uncle Hilary said with a little smile that seemed to say there was something wrong with it. “I get worn out by hotels and trains and languages I can’t speak, and oh, my poor stomach, the things it has to put up with! Sheep’s eyes and lung stew—”

  “And tomatoes covered with sugar,” interrupted Papa, laughing.

  Uncle Hilary looked a little put out, Ned thought, as
though he were the one supposed to make jokes. Then he said, “I just think it would do Ned a world of good. He’s never been away from here.”

  “Would you like that?” Papa suddenly asked Ned, bending slightly so he could see Ned under the table’s edge. “Uncle Hilary wants to take you on a trip during your Christmas vacation.”

  Ned’s heart leaped. He wanted to shout, Yes! There was something in his father’s voice that he hadn’t understood; it made him uneasy. If he said yes, he wanted to go with Uncle Hilary, would Papa think he wanted to get away from him?

  “Could you come, too?” he asked.

  “Ned, you know I can’t leave your mother,” Papa said reproachfully.

  “I must think of a place to take you that will fit exactly into ten days,” Uncle Hilary said.

  “Ned, do come out from under the table,” Papa said with the special patience he had when he was trying not to be cross. Ned got to his feet.

  Uncle Hilary’s visits were always brief. It was probably best that way, Ned thought. He’d noticed that his father was often touchy when his brother-in-law was staying with them. Uncle Hilary did like to tease Papa—the way he had about putting sugar on tomatoes.

  “The Georgia Sea Islands are too far,” said Uncle Hilary pensively. “But perhaps we could manage Nag’s Head.”

  “Well, Ned?” questioned his father.

  Uncle Hilary smiled at him. He looks like electricity, thought Ned and that made him grin. “I think he’d like to go,” said his uncle.

  “Yes, I do want to,” Ned said, looking at Papa.

  “Fine, then,” Papa said. He looked away from Ned, out the window. “We’ll have a harvest moon tonight,” he said.

  “Neddy, I must give you your birthday present. I’ll be gone in the morning long before you get up for school—that is, if that old fellow, and his taxi, gets here when he should.” He went out into the hall. Ned had a shelf of presents from Uncle Hilary, coins and ancient bones, a piece of oily spinach-colored jade from China, a pitcher made from lava spewed out from Mount Vesuvius, a butterfly in a glass case from Mexico and, the most valuable one of all, a bronze goat from Greece, so small Ned could hide it in his hand.

  Ned went over to his father and leaned against him, and Papa took his hand and pressed it lightly. Ned didn’t feel quite right. “Do you want me not to go?” he whispered.

  Papa turned to look at him. “I think you’ll have a fine time,” he said. “I’m getting used to the idea of it now.”

  Uncle Hilary came back carrying a long narrow case wrapped in brown paper and tied in several placed with thick cord.

  “I think he should open it,” Uncle Hilary said, placing the case on the floor. Ned took the library scissors and knelt and cut the cord and pulled off the wrapping paper and lifted the top of the case.

  If he had made a guess, it would have been the last thing he would have guessed, even if he’d been given one hundred chances. The room was so still he could hear the two men breathing. He picked up the air rifle and sat back on his heels.

  “A Daisy,” he said, looking up at his uncle, who nodded at him rapidly as though to assure him it was a gun he was holding.

  “It’s loaded,” said Uncle Hilary. “All ready to go. It’s time you had a boy’s present instead of an old bone or a dead bug or an ancient coin that wouldn’t buy you a jellybean.”

  “Those coins and bugs and bones and carvings you brought Ned were splendid,” Papa said loudly, “tokens, clues to the past, signs for guessing and imagining.”

  “Happy Birthday, Ned,” Uncle Hilary said uncertainly.

  “What is there to imagine with a gun?” asked Papa in the same loud voice. “Hilary, your gift is not quite the thing …”

  Ned’s hands tightened on the gun.

  “Something dead,” Papa said more quietly. “That’s what there is to imagine with a gun.”

  “I had thought of target practice,” Uncle Hilary said stiffly. “I had thought of skill and a trained eye—”

  “Perhaps in a few years,” his father said as though his uncle hadn’t spoken. “When you reach your fourteenth birthday, Ned, if you still want to learn to shoot—”

  “Papa,” protested Ned, “don’t you remember when you took me to the fair? You let me try at the rifle range and the man said I had a true eye and a steady hand. Don’t you remember that?”

  “That was a game,” Papa said. “Oh, Hilary! Really, you should have asked me about this!”

  “I had thought, James, you would be overjoyed if Ned brought down one of those chipmunks that has been dining on your roof timbers. You complain endlessly about them …”

  “That’s just what I don’t want him to do,” Papa said. His voice took on a conciliating tone. “Hilary, I know Ned appreciates your generosity. I do, too. But I must say no this time. I’ll put the gun away. Ned can have it when he’s older.”

  Papa reached for the Daisy. As Ned handed it to him, he thought for a moment the two men might start to fight. Uncle Hilary had taken a step toward Papa as though to snatch the gun away from him. Papa’s jaw was thrust out, his eyes narrowed. Then Uncle Hilary said, “I’m sorry to have made this difficulty.” He left the living room at once. Ned listened to his rapid footsteps going upstairs.

  “I know you’re disappointed, Ned,” Papa said softly. He placed his hand on Ned’s shoulder. It felt like a stone.

  “I ask you to trust me, Ned,” he said.

  Ned was staring at the engraving on the gun which Papa was holding, barrel down, in his other hand. It looked like a large bird in flight.

  “Will you trust me?” his father asked again, more insistently.

  The room seemed to have grown almost unbearably hot. Ned nodded slowly. His father withdrew his hand, and Ned went over to the radio and drew a finger down the muscular back of the bronze lion. The finger came up covered with dust. He imagined Mrs. Scallop saying, “Mrs. Scallop doesn’t dust lions.”

  “There are so many accidents with guns, Ned. People are blinded, maimed.”

  “I would only have shot at old tin cans,” Ned said. “I wouldn’t shoot a chipmunk.”

  He turned from the lion and saw on his father’s face an expression he didn’t like. It was the sympathy that was often there when he said no to something Ned wanted. The no was bad enough; the sympathy was awful.

  “Take your mind away from it. There’ll be other presents,” Papa said.

  Ned nodded, knowing that if he didn’t, his father would keep him in the room until he did. His father insisted on agreement, whatever else had happened. Ned went upstairs to go to the little room over the porch that Papa had said he could use for a study. As he walked through the hall, he saw that his mother’s room was dark but there was a line of light beneath Uncle Hilary’s door. In his study, he flung himself on the old horsehair sofa Papa had dragged in there. He looked at the table where there were piles of post cards, some of them from Uncle Hilary, others which he’d found in the attic. His stamp album was on the floor open to the page for stamps from Ruanda-Urundi. It was blank. He stared at the shelf where Uncle Hilary’s presents from over the years were lined up. There was nothing to do with them; they just sat there, looking dusty.

  He heard his father’s footsteps going up to the attic. Then that’s where he was taking the gun. His father wouldn’t hide it. The painful thing was that, though Ned didn’t always trust his father, his father trusted him, and that seemed to him unfair, although he couldn’t explain why it was so.

  The one thing in the world that would make him feel better right now was to have that gun in his hands once more, to feel the weight of it, to examine every inch of it closely. If he could do that only once, he would turn his mind from it as his father had told him to do.

  There was no door to Ned’s study, just a heavy old velvet curtain on rungs. Papa pushed it aside and stuck his head in.

  “Good night, dear Ned,” he said.

  “Good night, Papa.”

  “Don’t stay up t
oo late.”

  Gradually the night sounds of the old house faded away until all that was left was the creaking and sighing of the boards and joists, the old timbers. By the light of the orange moon that seemed twice as big as usual, he could see clearly the boughs of the maple tree. In a wind, even a slight breeze, they would click up against the window of his study. Papa was always saying he ought to prune the tree, but Ned loved the sound the branches made.

  He had always been so glad when Uncle Hilary visited. But not this time. He rolled off the horsehair sofa and onto a long patch of light on the floor. A coin fell out of his trouser pocket. It was the nickel that hadn’t been collected from him in church that morning. The morning felt a week away. He shot the nickel into a corner of the room the way he would have shot an aggie. He didn’t bother to look for it.

  The harvest moon had filled the whole house with pools and streams and narrow ribbons of light. As Ned wandered from window to window, holding his shoes in his hand so he wouldn’t make any noise, he lost track of time; the house seemed to float above the long meadows that ran down toward the Hudson and the north field edged by the grove of pines in whose branches Ned had often sat in the summer, reading a book. From the living room bay windows, he thought he could just make out the chalk-white ghostly Makepeace mansion beyond the far line of maples to the south.

  Leaning against the oak library table, he could see the dark narrow buildings of the asylum across the Hudson. Papa had taken him there once when he’d had to visit a parishioner who’d set fires all over the village of Tyler.

  Ned remembered playing with a wooden horse beneath a great elm tree while his father was in the red brick ward with its porches screened heavily with black wire, and how he’d looked up once and thought he’d seen a round pale face gazing down at him like a small moon.

  Though it was still warm from the day’s heat, Ned shivered as though feeling winter’s chill. He went through the central hall to the kitchen. At the back stairs, he stood for a long time listening.