Lawyer for the Cat (6 page)

 

The Beatrice Box

With her usual efficiency, Gina has sorted the paper contents of Lila Mackay's box into separate notebooks: “Vet bills,” “Notes,” “Letters,” “Miscellaneous.”

The oldest vet bill is from seven years ago, “Core vaccines, kitten series $45.00,” the most recent three months ago, “Office visit, hip dysplasia. Recommend weight loss. $50.00.” Except for the occasional bout of roundworms and ear mites, Beatrice has been a healthy cat. There's a letter dated shortly before Mrs. Mackay's death: “This office will be closing on December 31 due to my retirement. Unless you notify us that you wish your pet's records sent elsewhere, we will transfer them to Dr. Harriett McCoy in Rantowles. We have enclosed her card for your convenience.”

The notes are more interesting, page after page on white stationery, written in black (I imagine the fountain pen, the jar of ink), a cursive that in the first thirty or so pages is almost too perfect, the lines evenly spaced and very straight. Later the handwriting is shaky, the letters larger; the lines drift upward. In the final pages there are frequent corrections, words and phrases scratched out or put in parentheses with notes above them: “Not right word,” “Need better metaphor,” “Silly?”

Most of the notes are in first person and seem to be a sort of diary, though one only sporadically kept:

I spent most of the day by the fireplace. Too cold for our usual walk. She didn't go out, either; catching up on her correspondence. Billy stopped to pick up Gail's check. (She does the work, why does he get the check?)

Another entry:

Delightful afternoon on the piazza. Not too hot. There's something hypnotic about the Spanish moss swaying back and forth in the breeze. She's nearby, reading. We are such different creatures, but alike in our inability to trust anyone completely.

Who, I wonder, is this other woman? Is she still alive? Why wouldn't Mrs. Mackay have chosen her as the cat's caregiver? But the next note explains it:

Caught a mouse this morning. Was having fun until she took it away. “Not on your diet!” she says.

Mrs. Mackay is writing as if she's Beatrice, the cat. Maybe she
was
crazy after all.

I skip to the letters. There are carbon copies of letters written on an old typewriter whose lower-case
b
and
t
are off-center. One to the Highway Commission opposing a proposal to widen the highway onto the island, which will require removing some oak trees: “We who live on Edisto consider these trees our cherished friends. Some are three hundred years old. Would it not be wiser and kinder for us to slow down, rather than to cut them down?” A letter to the editor of the Columbia paper, from 1999: “The time has come for us to acknowledge that continuing to fly the Confederate flag at the State House is not done ‘to honor our history' but to preserve a symbol which is offensive to many. At best, this is an appalling display of bad manners; at worst, it is deliberately cruel.”

Another, from 1990: “My husband loved The Citadel. He served on its Board of Governors and gave generously to support scholarship students. Since his death I have tried to match his generosity, but I can no longer give to an institution which refuses to admit women. When you see fit to change your policy in this regard, I will resume my annual gifts.” Gina has stuck a note on this one:
What does this have to do with the cat?

After the carbon copies there's another stack of letters, undated, all in the same handwriting. The earliest is dated almost thirty years ago:

Dear Lila,

I have given our recent conversation much thought. Of course it was distressing to hear that you are so unhappy. I should not have added to that unhappiness by saying what I did, but surely you know that my feelings about your current predicament are complicated by our history. Whatever you decide to do, please know that I shall always be your devoted friend. Stop by the store when you're next in Charleston—I've made some improvements.

Fondly, Simon

P.S. Under the circumstances, you should probably resist your usual urge to file this away in your “archives.”

I scan the next four letters from Simon. Nothing more about her unhappiness.

Dear Lila,

I will have to decline your invitation to lunch next week, as I am temporarily confined to the apartment. The surgeon (a woman, very smart but, like you, a little dictator) has decreed that I rest, lest I ruin my ankle completely.

So pleased to hear about your new friend. I assume Beatrice likes Dante? (Don't be so snooty about her lack of pedigree. I thought you were more egalitarian than that.) May she be as loyal a companion to you as McCavity has been to me.

By the way, I'm sure you'll hear, if you haven't already, that the bookstore is closing. Soon King Street will be nothing but expensive shops, the same national chains you can find in any sizable town. Shall I venture to say this is one more sign that the world is going to hell, or do I just sound like a bitter old man?

Fondly,

S.

 

Precious

“Most cats don't travel well,” Tony had said, and Beatrice seems determined to prove him right, her high-pitched cries starting the minute I put her in the car, becoming louder at each intersection—she doesn't like moving, but she doesn't like stopping, either—as I drive south on Highway 17 toward Edisto.

“Settle down, honey,” I say, and she glares at me through the holes in the carrier as if to say,
Don't call me ‘honey.'
But as we leave the heavy traffic behind and cross the Wallace River she's calmer, her complaints less dramatic, and by the time we turn onto Toogoodoo Road, she's quiet.

Does she know we're headed toward Edisto Island? I remember reading about a lost cat who walked two hundred miles to find home. My sense of direction can't compare: I frequently get lost when I leave the Charleston peninsula, despite instructions from the GPS lady (I finally had to disable the thing; she was driving me crazy). “The reason you get lost,” my ex, Joe, once said, “is that you always want to be somewhere else.” He was right: I was always imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else. Out West, I'd fantasize, or Alaska. “Or maybe you don't really want to live someplace else,” he said, “you want to
be
someone else.” And he was right again. “Remember, even if you manage to get a change of venue, you're still going to be the same old self!”

Edisto is the kind of place, only an hour from Charleston, where I can imagine being someone else. The state highway winds through the country: woodland and marsh, farms, a few houses. Sometimes the road seems about to disappear into the marsh and I'm sure I'm really lost this time, but then I recognize the intersection. Beatrice, on the seat beside me, is lying down but alert, her head erect. When I make the left onto Highway 174 she lets out a long satisfied “meow,” as if to say:
Yes, I really
am
going home!

It's been years since I've driven out here—the last time wasn't long after my divorce from Joe, when Frank McGill took me to a New Year's Day oyster roast. I'd accepted the invitation only because Frank, a fellow public defender, insisted he was just trying to cheer me up. I wasn't ready to start dating again, and wondered if I'd ever be. But at just about this point in the drive—the bridge over the Edisto River—Frank confided that he'd had a crush on me since law school. Poor thing, his wooing skills were about on par with his courtroom skills, his argument pathetically sincere but hopeless. I did my best to state my case without crushing him:
It has nothing to do with you, Frank, I'm just not ready.

By the time we arrived at the party I was desperate to disappear into the crowd. I found a place at one of the tables with people I didn't know. We stood around in the cold, stamping our feet and poking around in the pile of picked-over oysters and waiting for the next load to be shoveled onto the table. When they came I busied myself prying a big one open, finding the slit between the halves of the sharp shell, twisting the knife until the thing revealed its glistening meat. Shucking oysters is dangerous business even with gloves, and since I was a determined vegetarian, I was violating my principles. I remember the pain as the knife slipped, jabbing my wrist just above the glove.

There was a lot of blood, and the hostess insisted I come inside the house to clean the wound, and then—I should have known he might be there—Joe was next to me, his arm touching my elbow. “Probably won't need stitches,” he said, “but you ought to get some antibiotic on it.” There was a woman with him, one of those dainty creatures who manage to look petite even in multiple layers of heavy clothing. “Sally, you remember Susan Harmon?” I nodded dumbly, closed the bathroom door, and cried while I let the hot water run over the cut. I convinced Frank to take me home early. “I have a terrible headache,” I said.

I did have a headache, but it wasn't from the pain of the wound. I'd been undone by seeing Joe with another woman. It was totally foreseeable, of course. He was young, good-looking, affable, an associate in his family's venerable Charleston firm. He was still living in our apartment, but would soon, with his parents' help, buy a place of his own a couple of blocks away from their house on Church Street. As far as they were concerned he'd made only one mistake in his life, and that was to marry me, that strange ungainly girl from upstate, who was definitely not, as they would say, “our kind of people.” She was smart, yes, but why on earth did she want to work at the public defender's office? Thank God she'd done him the favor of leaving him—after only a year, can you imagine!—though everyone said she'd lost her mind. If she thought she'd ever find a husband better than their Joe, she had another think coming.

And now I look for the turnoff to Oak Bluff Plantation Road. (“It's a dirt road, on your right, about half a mile after you pass the Presbyterian church,” said Gail Sims, the caretaker, who's meeting me at the house. “The road'll wind around and you'll see a coupla trailers and then an old store and not much after that you'll come to the gate. Just push it open—it's not locked.” As we pass through the gate the cat lifts her chin, looks straight ahead. She can't see what I see—the glimpse of gray-white behind the row of oaks, the red roof against the clear sky—but she knows where we're going.

The house isn't as large as I'd imagined, and badly needs painting. It seems very plain, boxlike, until I realize I've approached the back side of the house. I follow a brick walkway around to the front, and then I can see the glory of the place: the view from the bluff overlooking the river. There's a wide piazza running the length of the house on the main floor, reachable by a long, wide flight of stairs.

I'm looking up the stairs at what must be the front door, dreading the thought of having to lug Beatrice in her carrier, when a young woman appears at ground level, right in front of me, as if she's come from nowhere.

“Oh, precious!” she says to the cat. “I've been missing you!” And to me: “I'm Gail. Come on in.” She gestures toward what seems to be a basement door, under the stairs. “We can talk down here if that's okay—save you the climb. It's kind of a mess upstairs, anyway.” She leads me into a large, musty-smelling kitchen, one countertop completely covered with magazines and newspapers. “Watch your head. In the old days this part of the house was just used for storage,” she explains, “but Lila turned it into an apartment for herself, turned the storeroom into this kitchen, and she stayed down here most of the time. This room over here,” she says as we cross a narrow hallway, “is where she did her writing. Lila, she was always writing. I told her she should get a real desk—you know, with drawers to put stuff—but she just wouldn't hear of moving her papers and things off that old table. I did my best to help her keep things straight, but she wouldn't let me touch them.” Indeed, there are piles of papers on the long table behind the sofa. But despite its clutter, the room is inviting and warm, with a fire going strong in the fireplace. “Billy says this is the only part of the house that's livable.”

“Billy?”

“My fiancé. We been together a while now.” She looks about thirty, boyish, her wheat-colored hair cut short, her jeans clean but showing some wear and tear. “He works on the shrimp boats.” She moves some magazines off the sofa, gives the cushion a swat. Dust rises, swirls in the light from the fire. “You can set right here. Sorry the place is such a mess. She wouldn't let anybody touch it while she was alive, but I shoulda come down here and cleaned up after she passed. I guess I—I just couldn't get it through my head that she wasn't coming back.”

“Don't worry about it,” I say, “this shouldn't take long.”

“Time to let you out of jail,” Gail says to Beatrice, opening the door to the carrier. “Come here, you precious thing, come to Gail.” She sits on the wide hearth across from me and the cat settles in her lap. “There! You know where you belong, don't you, precious?” The fire crackles behind her.

“So,” I take a notepad out of my purse, “you understand why I'm here?”

“I heard about the will.”

“Actually, it's a trust.”

“Well, whatever it is, I heard it's a lot of money. Don't it beat all?” She strokes Beatrice under the chin, which the cat clearly enjoys. “Who'da thought she was so loaded?”

“Did Mrs. Mackay discuss the terms of the trust with you before she died?”

“She sure didn't. Lila was real private about her money.”

“So, how did you learn about it?” I ask.