Cat in Glass (2 page)

At the top of the V & T grade, Kate shifted down, and the Jeep’s fat tires screamed as they grabbed the pavement
of the main road to Silver City, the nearly abandoned mining town on the other side of the hills. They roared like a fire engine past the crumbling graveyard and the entrance to the old Fairman Tunnel. They sprayed dust at the Sutro Hotel and startled the mangy brown dog that lay in the sun on Main Street. When they skidded to a stop in front of Old Pete’s Crystal Saloon, Kathy discovered that she was out of breath, and her fingers ached from hanging on so tightly. She wanted more.

“Come on. I’ll buy you a drink,” said Kate, clapping the flat-brimmed hat onto her head.

Kathy wobbled into the dark coolness of the saloon like a sailor who has just left his ship. Wooden ceiling fans stirred the dry air above her head. A row of slot machines stood against one wall. Shelves lined the other walls, crowded with bits of junk that Old Pete had collected—rocks with fool’s gold embedded in them, broken arrowheads, rusty mill gears, and pieces of peeling harness. A jukebox played country music softly from a corner in the back. Kathy climbed onto a stool beside Kate at the massive oak bar.

“Afternoon, ladies. What’ll it be?” said Old Pete, wiping his hands on his dirty white apron.

“Double bourbon, neat,” said Kate.

“Uh … root beer,” said Kathy.

Pete washed and dried two glasses. He smiled, revealing a mouth full of night, marred only by two brownish teeth. He contemplated Kate and Kathy with friendly eyes, which too many years of sun had made wet and milky. “Mother and daughter, right?” he said.

“Guess again,” said Kate.

Pete puckered his thin, dry lips. “Sisters?”

“Yeah, something like that.” She winked and picked up their drinks.

Kate led Kathy to a table where they could watch the wind blowing dust along the wooden sidewalks outside. Kathy gazed at her as she took off her hat and tossed it easily onto the seat of the nearest chair. Was it true? Kathy imagined two people standing in a mountain stream. Would water that had touched her ankles touch Kate’s someday?

“Who are you … really?” she asked softly.

Kate rubbed her thumb across the ridges of the bourbon glass. In the dim light of the saloon, her eyes were black lakes. “I swear to you, this is the truth. This morning I woke up just after sunrise, and I got dressed, and I went for a walk in Central Park. I thought, I’m thirty-seven years old, and it’s June twenty-first, and twenty years ago to the day, I almost jumped off a cliff. I would have done it. Except a woman named Kate stopped me.”

She lifted the bourbon and took a long swallow. “I thought about how fine the morning sun always looks, whether I see it on a wild lake or a row of city windows. And I knew it was time to go back, time to find you. I just knew what to do. Someday you will, too.”

Kathy sipped at her root beer. It was too sweet, and not very cold. But her throat cried out for something to soothe away the sudden dryness. “Central Park? That’s in New York, isn’t it?”

Kate smiled and nodded. She slipped her wedding ring off and slid it across the table to Kathy. Kathy picked it up.
It felt heavy and warm and real. She closed her eyes and pressed the ring hard into her palm, trying to imagine a life that included things like Central Park and Manhattan and South American hats and a man who loved a woman who smoked cigars and carried a lavender silk handkerchief crumpled up in her pocket.

“Trust me, cookie,” said Kate. “Your future is worth staying around for.”

One tear, then another dropped onto the shining table-top between Kathy’s hands. She slid the ring back to Kate. “Promise?” she whispered.

“I promise.”

Kate finished her bourbon in a long, last swallow, stood up, and grinned. “People are waiting for me,” she said. “Good-bye, cookie. Take care of yourself.” She turned and walked through the saloon doors to the street.

Several seconds passed before Kathy realized that Kate had forgotten her hat. “Kate!” she shouted. “Wait a minute!”

She shoved her chair back, grabbed the hat, and ran outside. She squinted up and down the sun-bleached street. But the wooden sidewalks and the dilapidated buildings stood deserted in the dry wind. The old dog had not stirred from his place in the middle of the road. The Jeep had disappeared. And Kate was nowhere to be seen.

Kathy turned the hat over and over in her hands. It was made of heavy wool felt, flexible but sturdy. Grimy fingerprints darkened the brim where Kate had habitually touched it. Inside the crown she found a small leather sticker that said
Producto de Buenos Aires
in shiny gold letters.

Just for fun, she clapped the hat over her own short curls. It fit perfectly. It smelled like peanuts and cigars and sweet, green grass.

Kathy smiled and stuck her hands in her pockets, wondering how far away New York City was.

A
s I approach my seventieth birthday, I find myself thinking more and more often of Aunt Henrietta and of the terrible thing my brother, Harry, and I did to her many years ago. Autumn has arrived, and I am growing old; perhaps that accounts for it. I have recently taken to spending an hour each morning on the porch. From my chair, I am occasionally lucky enough to see a balloon or two drift by, high and huge and wonderful, silent as clouds. Sometimes a breeze rattles the sumac leaves just the right way, or I catch a breath of apple cider on the air. Then I think perhaps I understand Aunt Henrietta as I never did when I was young. It isn’t regret that I feel exactly—

something more like wistfulness. If only Henrietta had fully respected our childhood view of justice; if only Clotaire the balloonist had respected it a little less.

When Harry was eight and I was ten, our mother fell ill. At that time, we had wonderful lodgings in the city, in an ornate copper-roofed house that overlooked one of the parks. Harry and I were in the habit of sneaking about in the dark after we were supposed to be asleep. One evening early in spring, we peeked around the drawing room doorway. By the warm, uneven light of the fire, we saw Mother in her dressing gown and a quilt, seated in the largest and softest of the armchairs. Father sat beside her on the floor, leaning against her knees, an empty brandy glass tilted in his hand. I had never seen him sit on the floor before. Neither of them spoke or moved, but something about the way they stared into the flames made me feel quite empty and afraid. At that moment, I realized for the first time just how ill Mother really was.

Father’s subsequent actions bore this out. In the middle of May we moved to a house in the country, where Mother spent most of her time lying in bed in a sunny room upstairs. The doctor gave orders that Harry and I were to see her no more than an hour each day and that even then we must be quiet and try not to excite her. This news terrified and infuriated me. In retribution, I took to breaking vases and scattering silverware about on the floor while Harry looked on in awe.

Two things happened because of this. First, Harry and I were firmly encouraged to stay outdoors most of the time, which is how we discovered Clotaire. And second, Father sent for his sister, Henrietta. So Clotaire and Aunt Henrietta entered our world together, the same way in which they departed from it.

One of those first country spring afternoons, as we stood with Father on the spacious lawn in front of our new house, Harry and I spied a balloon drifting high in the distance. I had never seen a balloon before and wasn’t at all sure what it could be. I still remember just how it looked—shining silver, with a magnificent sun, moon, and stars about its circumference. It belonged to Clotaire, of course, though we didn’t know it yet.

I jumped up and down, trying to see it better over the treetops, and cried, “What is it? It’s so beautiful!”

“That’s a balloon, Catherine,” said Father. “There’s a man hanging from it in a basket. He’s taking a ride.”

Harry leapt up as well, his cheeks all aglow, shouting, “Daddy, make him bring it here! I want a ride, too!”

Father laughed. His laughter in those days was brief and quiet and always made me think of Mother, lying pale in her bed. “I’m afraid he’s too far away to hear us,” he said, reaching down to tousle Harry’s brown curls.

Harry squirmed but flashed one of those empty, sunny smiles of his. Father looked down at him, returned the smile rather stiffly, and said, “Come inside now, children. I have a surprise for you.”

So, shielding our eyes and pointing at the receding silver balloon, Harry and I stumbled up the path to the front door and ran directly into Father’s surprise—Aunt Henrietta. He hadn’t told us he was expecting her, and I suppose we must have been playing and thus missed noticing the carriage that brought her from the station. At any rate, the unexpected sight of her ample, stalwart figure in the doorway affected us like a bolt of lightning from a cloudless sky. Harry and I were dumbstruck.

Tenacity and the smells of starched lace and lavender hovered around Aunt Henrietta, mothlike. We had never known her very well. She lived far away, visited our house only one week a year, and always brought with her a suit of scratchy new underwear for each of us. She taught at a private girls’ school and raised large maroon roses in her spare time. I had two vivid memories of her, both of which at that moment crashed around inside my head like trapped finches. The first was of her slapping my hand as I reached for a third piece of cake at teatime. The second was of Harry’s gurgling screams as she held him by the ear and washed his mouth out with laundry soap. He had made the mistake of saying aloud that he “didn’t give a hoot about the heathen children in China,” a turn of phrase that he had picked up from Father.

I suppose Harry and I must have looked a little bewildered as we stared up at her on the doorstep. She possessed hugely expressive black eyebrows, which she now raised into swooping arches that reached almost to the line of her stone-gray hair. “Children!” she said, her voice warm and
sweet as those disgusting fig tarts she loved to eat. “How delightful to see you again.”

Father put a hand on each of our shoulders. “Henrietta’s come to stay with us until Mother gets better. Isn’t that good of her?”

The eyebrows dropped, and a sort of smile crackled its way across Aunt Henrietta’s powdery face. “Yes. I’ve come to help your father look after you for a little while. Won’t that be nice?”

I suppose she thought she was doing the right thing. Perhaps she even thought this type of sacrifice would assure her of a place in heaven. After all, she was a solid and confident woman, with lucid ideas of the world. In all likelihood, it never occurred to her that she might only make matters worse by volunteering her services.

Harry and I were too young to see any of this, however. I knew only that Aunt Henrietta’s presence at a time like this must mean that my mother was in terrible danger.

I started the new venture off well—with a bloodcurdling scream followed by, “I won’t! I won’t let you look after me. It’s Mother’s job. Leave me alone!” I ran straight across the lawn and into the woods, where I found solace in the rough branches of a maple tree. I cried until dark, when, as no one came looking for me, I climbed down and made my way home, feeling hungry and deserted.

Aunt Henrietta’s presence in the house caused Harry and me to spend more time than ever out of doors. By the middle of July, when we first met Clotaire, we already knew exactly
which trees in our woods were favored by cardinals and which by mourning doves; we had explored every turnstile and rock wall inch by inch and even befriended the great black bull who sometimes grazed in the field adjoining our raspberry patch.

Most important of all, we had learned to guess when the wonderful silver balloon was most likely to come drifting past. It had to be just the right kind of day. There had to be a line of dust shimmering like a halo on the road, and the sky had to look like Mother’s blue crystal vase. Then, if luck and the high breeze came our way, we might catch a glimpse of the balloon, shining like an errant moon in the perfect sunlight. Now and then, it came so near to us that we could discern and wave to the man in the basket. Sometimes he waved in return, and sometimes he did not.

One afternoon during a fine round of our favorite game, missionaries and cannibals, we heard a strange sound. Harry and I stood still as rocks and listened. It was a noise like the beating of gigantic wings, accompanied by that odd roar and bellow that bulls sometimes produce when they are angry or afraid.

“Cathy, there’s something in the field,” whispered Harry. The dry willow branch he’d been using as a cannibal spear dropped unnoticed from his hand. That, and a slight croak in his voice, made the hair on my arms stand straight up beneath the sleeves of my blouse.

In a moment I saw what Harry was talking about—a huge, glowing thing that moved in waves just beyond the raspberries and the hedge. I got down on my hands and
knees, crept through our secret hedge tunnel, and peeked out on the other side.

Harry was just behind me, not to be outdone by a girl. “Is it anything awful?”

I made room for him beside me. “Come and see.”

Before us in that ordinary field was a sight that visits the dreams of an old woman to this very day. A tall but otherwise unremarkable chestnut tree grew there, and caught in its branches was the grand silver balloon. We saw immediately that the basket, all askew, hung empty. But directly beneath it a man lay in the grass, half propped on his elbows and looking very distressed indeed. Our friend the black bull pawed the ground no more than two yards away from him.

I stood up for a better look and, as sometimes happens with little girls, fell in love straightaway. I had previously thought that no one could possibly be more handsome and dashing than Father, but as I stood watching in the afternoon sun, I knew that Father had met his match. The fellow sported aviator’s breeches and puttees and a lovely ivory-colored scarf. His eyes, the dazzling color of robins’ eggs, were set in a strong, well-tanned face, and his hair and mustache gleamed like heaps of gold coins. Moreover, he seemed clearly in pain and danger. At once I felt capable of even the most arduous rescue. I floated in visions of befriending him and showing him off to Father and Aunt Henrietta, who seemed to care so little for me that they would let me sit in a tree by myself half the night.