One-Eyed Cat (2 page)

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 there 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.

Ned stood next to Papa at the church door and shook hands with the men and bowed to the ladies. He tried to ignore Ben Smith, who was making faces at him, then ducking behind his elder brother. Ben made the most terrible faces he'd ever seen, much better than Billy Gaskell's, who was in Ned's sixth grade at school.

Ben pushed up his nose, pulled down his lower lids and stuck his tongue out, all at once. Ned felt a great single shout of laughter rising inside of himself. He turned his back on Ben and tried to concentrate on Mr. Deems hitching his mare up to the dusty old buckboard.

Later, after Papa and he had stopped to get the Sunday paper in Tyler and were driving on to Mrs. Brewster's house, Papa said, “That child, Ben Smith … I've never seen anyone make such a face, have you? He looked exactly like a gargoyle.”

Ned let out the laughter that had remained somewhere inside him since Ben had made his prize face, and Papa laughed, too.

When Papa laughed like that, Ned was at once reminded of the past, the time before his mother had become ill. He imagined the three of them dancing down the living room holding hands, or skipping stones down by the Hudson River on a little muddy strip of shore where cattails grew and large damp toads hid behind rocks and the days were always sunny. He knew it couldn't have been like that; he knew it must have rained and stormed, that they hadn't spent all their time dancing and skipping stones and laughing together, yet it
felt
as though they had. It was the time he'd been happy and hadn't known it. When he was happy now, he would remind himself he was. He would say,
At this moment I'm happy,
and that was different from simply being a certain way and not having to give it a name.

Papa parked in front of the path that led to the Brewster house. It was old and narrow and leaned slightly toward a giant elm which stood next to it. A branch of the elm crossed the front of the house just beneath the two second-floor windows like a mustache.

Mrs. Brewster and her daughter welcomed them with high, wordless cries of delight. The house smelled of rat cheese and old newspapers and candle wax. Ned glanced into the small dining room and saw the food was already on the table; a great knob of butter had melted then hardened over a mountain of lumpy, mashed potatoes, and a very small joint of meat sat on a large platter. Once when they'd had Sunday dinner with the Brewsters, Ned had asked for a second helping of beef, and his father had pinched his knee and shaken his head slightly so that Ned had to say he'd changed his mind. Afterwards, Papa explained that the Brewster ladies were really as poor as church mice, and that it was best not to ask for second helpings, since you never knew what it cost people to give you a meal.

Mrs. and Miss Brewster seemed so old to Ned that it was hard for him to believe one was the daughter of the other. They both looked exactly like the women in the tintypes that were glued in an album they kept on the pine table in the living room, and which Ned always looked through when dinner was over and Papa and the Brewster ladies were speaking softly together over their coffee. Ned wasn't interested in their conversations except when his father gave a small, delicate snort of laughter. Then he knew that one of the Brewsters must have said something funny about someone in the congregation. It was the same kind of laugh Papa gave when Ned imitated Mr. Deems's extremely deep voice, or Mrs. Brewster's famous long-held note at the end of a hymn. It was not that his father was unkind—it was that he appreciated the comical side of people. In a way, Ned felt more friendly toward his father when he laughed than he did when the Reverend Wallis looked sad and described a person as being poor or miserable or brave through adversity.

Ned wandered outside the kitchen door and into the yard. Far in the distance, he glimpsed old Mr. Deems slowly traveling along the road to his farm. He was bent over the reins; the old horse bobbed along. Mr. Deems wore his long shabby dark coat, pinned at his throat with a huge safety pin. No one that Ned knew had ever seen him without that coat. He caught the hazy, grainy smell of chicken feed as a faint breeze started up, and he walked over to the small coop where the Brewsters kept a few chickens. They clucked and complained as he looked down at them. He didn't really like having Sunday dinner with people from church. It made him feel homeless, the way, he imagined, the children in the orphanage in. Waterville must feel. He kicked at a stone in the grass and the hens set up an outraged cackling.

“Such a big boy,” observed Miss Brewster as he walked back into the dining room. She said it every time Ned and Papa had dinner there. “I believe it must be close to your birthday,” she added. Ned was surprised; grown-ups often recalled things he thought they would have forgotten.

“Ned will be eleven on Wednesday,” Papa said.

“That's a very important birthday,” said Mrs. Brewster.

“All birthdays are important,” observed Miss Brewster, “up to a point.”

Both ladies tittered.

The sunlight fell upon the crumpled linen napkins, the flower-decorated coffee cups, the dry and thickly iced lemon cake. Mrs. Scallop, thought Ned, would have been insulted by such a cake. She was insulted several times a day—by bad weather, by stories in the newspaper, by a crow scolding from the old maple tree outside the kitchen window. “That crow is positively insulting,” she had said to Ned.

He was happy to get back inside the sun-warmed Packard, to drive away from Tyler toward home. They passed through woods still dense with foliage, though the leaves were yellow and copper-colored, through open fields, a village half the size of Tyler which looked entirely deserted, then a meadow where a white dog sat on its haunches staring at five motionless cows. Soon, Ned saw the western slopes of the mountains beyond which the Hudson flowed.