Cat in Glass (8 page)

Delia died officially in the hospital a short time later. After a cursory investigation, the police laid the blame on Freddy. I still have the newspaper clipping, yellow now, and held together with even yellower cellophane tape. “The family
dog lay dead near the victim, blood smearing its muzzle and forepaws. Sergeant Morton theorizes that the dog, a pit bull terrier and member of a breed specifically developed for vicious fighting, turned killer and attacked its tragic young owner. He also suggests that the child, during the death struggle, flung the murderous beast away with enough strength to break its neck.”

Even I, a little girl, knew that this “theory” was lame; the neck of a pit bull is an almost impossible thing to break, even by a large, determined man. And Freddy, in spite of his breeding, had always been gentle, even protective, with us. Simply stated, the police were mystified, and this was the closest thing to a rational explanation they could produce. As far as they were concerned, that was the end of the matter. In fact, it had only just begun.

I was shipped off to my aunt Josie’s house for several months. What Father did during this time I never knew, though I now suspect he spent those months in a sanitarium. In the course of a year, he had lost first his wife and then his daughter. Delia’s death alone was the kind of outrage that might permanently have unhinged a lesser man. But a child has no way of knowing such things. I was bitterly angry at him for going away. Aunt Josie, though kind and good-hearted, was a virtual stranger to me, and I felt deserted. I had nightmares in which the glass cat slunk out of its place by the hearth and across the countryside. I would hear its hard claws ticking along the floor outside the room where I slept. At those times, half awake and screaming in the dark, no one could have comforted me except Father.

When he did return, the strain of his suffering showed. His face was thin and weary and his hair dusted with new gray, as if he had stood outside too long on a frosty night. On the afternoon of his arrival, he sat with me on Aunt Josie’s sofa, stroking my cheek while I cuddled gladly, my anger at least temporarily forgotten in the joy of having him back.

His voice, when he spoke, was as tired as his face. “Well, my darling Amy, what do you suppose we should do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I assumed that, as always in the past, he had something entertaining in mind—that he would suggest it and then we would do it.

He sighed. “Shall we go home?”

I went practically rigid with fear. “Is the cat still there?”

Father looked at me, frowning slightly. “Do we have a cat?”

I nodded. “The big glass one.”

He blinked, then made the connection. “Oh, the Chelichev, you mean? Well … I suppose it’s still there. I hope so, in fact.”

I clung to him, scrambling halfway up his shoulders in my panic. I could not manage to speak. All that came out of my mouth was an erratic series of whimpers.

“Sh, sh,” said Father. I hid my face in the starched white cloth of his shirt and heard him whisper, as if to himself, “How can a glass cat frighten a child who’s seen the things you’ve seen?”

“I hate him! He’s glad Delia died. And now he wants to get
me
.”

Father hugged me fiercely. “You’ll never see him again.
I promise you,” he said. And it was true, at least as long as he lived.

So the Chelichev
Cat in Glass
was packed away in a box and put into storage with the rest of our furnishings. Father sold the house, and we traveled for two years. When the horror had faded sufficiently, we returned home to begin a new life. Father went back to his professorship, and I to my studies at Chesly Girls’ Day School. He bought a new house. The glass cat was not among the items he had sent up from storage. I did not ask him why. I was just as happy to forget about it, and forget it I did.

I neither saw the glass cat nor heard of it again until many years later. I was a grown woman by then, a schoolteacher in a town far from the one in which I’d spent my childhood. I was married to a banker and had two lovely daughters and even a cat, which I finally permitted in spite of my abhorrence for them, because the girls begged so hard for one. I thought my life was settled, that it would progress smoothly toward a peaceful old age. But this was not to be. The glass cat had other plans.

The chain of events began with Father’s death. It happened suddenly, on a snowy afternoon, as he graded papers in the tiny snug office he had always had on campus. A heart attack, they said. He was found seated at his desk, Erik Satie’s Dadaist composition, “La Belle Excentrique,” still spinning on the turntable of his record player.

I was not at all surprised to discover that he had left his affairs in some disarray. It’s not that he had debts or was a
gambler. Nothing so serious. It’s just that order was slightly contrary to his nature. I remember once, as a very young woman, chiding him for the modest level of chaos he preferred in his life. “Really, Father,” I said. “Can’t you admire Dadaism without living it?” He laughed and admitted that he didn’t seem able to.

As Father’s only living relative, I inherited his house and other property, including his personal possessions. There were deeds to be transferred, insurance reports to be filed, bills and loans to be paid. He did have an attorney, an old school friend of his who helped me a great deal in organizing the storm of paperwork from a distance. The attorney also arranged for the sale of the house and hired someone to clean it out and ship the contents to us. In the course of the winter, a steady stream of cartons containing everything from scrapbooks to Chinese miniatures arrived at our doorstep. So I thought nothing of it when a large box labeled “fragile” was delivered one day by registered courier. There was a note from the attorney attached, explaining that he had just discovered it in a storage warehouse under Father’s name and had had them ship it to me unopened.

It was a dismal February afternoon, a Friday. I had just come home from teaching. My husband, Stephen, had taken the girls to the mountains for a weekend of skiing, a sport I disliked. I had stayed behind and was looking forward to a couple of days of quiet solitude. The wind drove spittles of rain at the windows as I knelt on the floor of the front room and opened the box. I can’t explain to you quite what I felt
when I pulled away the packing paper and found myself face to face with the glass cat. Something akin to uncovering a nest of cockroaches in a drawer of sachet, I suppose. And that was swiftly followed by a horrid and minutely detailed mental recreation of Delia’s death.

I swallowed my screams, struggling to replace them with something rational. “It’s merely a glorified piece of glass.” My voice bounced off the walls in the lonely house, hardly comforting.

I had an overpowering image of something inside me, something dark and featureless except for wide, white eyes and scrabbling claws.
Get us out of here
! it cried, and I obliged, seizing my coat from the closet hook and stumbling out into the wind.

I ran in the direction of town, slowing only when one of my shoes fell off and I realized how I must look. Soon, I found myself seated at a table in a diner, warming my hands in the steam from a cup of coffee, trying to convince myself that I was just being silly. I nursed the coffee as long as I could. It was dusk by the time I felt able to return home. There I found the glass cat, still waiting for me.

I turned on the radio for company and made a fire in the fireplace. Then I sat down before the box and finished unpacking it. The sculpture was as horrible as I remembered, truly ugly and disquieting. I might never have understood why Father kept it if he had not enclosed this letter of explanation, neatly handwritten on his college stationery:

I closed the box, sealed it with the note inside, and spent the next two nights in a hotel, pacing the floor, sleeping little. The following Monday, Stephen took the cat to an art dealer for appraisal. He came home late that afternoon excited and full of news about the great Alexander Chelichev.

He made himself a gin and tonic as he expounded. “That glass cat is priceless, Amy. Did you realize? If your father had sold it, he’d have been independently wealthy. He never let on.”

I was putting dinner on the table. The weekend had been a terrible strain. This had been a difficult day on top of it—snowy, and the children in my school class were wild with pent-up energy. So were our daughters, Eleanor and Rose, aged seven and four respectively. I could hear them quarreling in the playroom down the hall.

“Well, I’m glad to hear the horrid thing is worth something,” I said. “Why don’t we sell it and hire a maid?”

Stephen laughed as if I’d made an incredibly good joke. “A maid? You could hire a thousand maids, for what that cat would bring at auction. It’s a fascinating piece with an extraordinary history. You know, the value of something like this will increase with time. I think we’ll do well to keep it awhile.”

My fingers grew suddenly icy on the hot rim of the potato bowl. “I wasn’t trying to be funny, Stephen. It’s ugly and disgusting. If I could, I would make it disappear from the face of the Earth.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What’s this? Rebellion? Look, if you really want a maid, I’ll get you one.”

“That’s not the point. I won’t have the damned thing in my house.”

“I’d rather you didn’t swear, Amelia. The children might hear.”

“I don’t care if they do.”

The whole thing degenerated from there. I tried to explain the cat’s connection with Delia’s death. But Stephen had stopped listening by then. He sulked through dinner. Eleanor and Rose argued over who got which spoonful of peas. And I struggled with a steadily growing sense of dread that seemed much too large for the facts of the matter.

When dinner was over, Stephen announced with exaggerated brightness, “Girls, we’d like your help in deciding an important question.”

“Oh goody,” said Rose.

“What is it?” said Eleanor.

“Please don’t,” I said. It was all I could do to keep from shouting.

Stephen flashed me the boyish grin with which he had originally won my heart. “Oh, come on. Try to look at it objectively. You’re just sensitive about this because of an irrational notion from your childhood. Let the girls judge. If they like it, why not keep it?”

I should have ended it there. I should have insisted. Hindsight is always perfect, as they say. But inside me a little seed of doubt had sprouted. Stephen was always so logical and so right, especially about financial matters. Maybe he was right about this, too.

He had brought the thing home from the appraiser
without telling me. He was never above a little subterfuge if it got him his own way. Now he carried the carton in from the garage and unwrapped it in the middle of our warm, hardwood floor, with all the lights blazing. Nothing had changed. I found it as frightening as ever. I could feel cold sweat collecting on my forehead as I stared at it, all aglitter in a rainbow of refracted lamplight.

Eleanor was enthralled with it. She caught our real cat, a calico named Jelly, and held it up to the sculpture. “See, Jelly? You’ve got a handsome partner now.” But Jelly twisted and hissed in Eleanor’s arms until she let her go. Eleanor laughed and said Jelly was jealous.

Rose was almost as uncooperative as Jelly. She shrank away from the glass cat, peeking at it from between her father’s knees. But Stephen would have none of that.

“Go on, Rose,” he said. “It’s just a kitty made of glass. Touch it and see.” And he took her by the shoulders and pushed her gently toward it. She put out one hand, hesitantly, as she would have with a live cat who did not know her. I saw her finger touch a nodule of glass shards that might have been its nose. She drew back with a little yelp of pain. And that’s how it began. So innocently.

“He bit me!” she cried.

“What happened?” said Stephen. “Did you break it?” He ran to the sculpture first, the brute, to make sure she hadn’t damaged it.

She held her finger out to me. There was a tiny cut with a single drop of bright red blood oozing from it. “Mommy, it burns, it burns.” She was no longer just crying. She was screaming.

We took her into the bathroom. Stephen held her while I washed the cut and pressed a cold cloth to it. The bleeding stopped in a moment, but still she screamed. Stephen grew angry. “What’s this nonsense? It’s a scratch. Just a scratch.”

Rose jerked and kicked and bellowed. In Stephen’s defense, I tell you now it was a terrifying sight, and he was never able to deal well with real fear, especially in himself. He always tried to mask it with anger. We had a neighbor who was a physician. “If you don’t stop it, Rose, I’ll call Doctor Pepperman. Is that what you want?” he said, as if Doctor Pepperman, a jolly septuagenarian, were anything but charming and gentle, as if threats were anything but asinine at such a time.