A Cat Tells Two Tales

by Lydia Adamson

  He shrugged mightily and moved off, gesturing with one hand that we should follow. We passed through an open door and then a locked door and came to a ward divided into small cubicles of two beds each.

  Dr. Wallace stopped in front of one. He pointed. I stared at the figure on the bed. It looked like a dead man. Grablewski was lying on his back, his arms strangely folded, as if he had just emerged out of some kind of restraint. His body was absolutely pale . . . as if some fiend had drained his blood. I could see that he was breathing; his chest was moving. His eyes were half open but not focusing. He looked childlike on that bed. The sight of him made me weak. I grasped the end of the steel cot. Basillio reached out to steady me but didn’t make contact.

  “What happened to him?” I asked plaintively.

  “Are you kidding me? I thought you were his friend,” Dr. Wallace said, his voice stacked with contempt. His response confused me.

  “If you’re his friend,” he continued, “you know he’s an alcoholic, don’t you? And you know he’s been an alcoholic a long time.”

  There was silence. We were all standing, not speaking, and seeming at cross-purposes.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Wallace said in a resigned, sardonic voice, “let me give you the lesson you crave. The gentleman you are looking at is suffering from a common condition called fasting alcoholic hypoglycemia. It is usually seen in malnourished alcoholics. It is characterized by conjugate deviation of the eyes, extensor rigidity of the extremities, unilateral or bilateral Babinski reflexes, convulsions, transient hemiparesis, trismus hypothermia. It is caused by a multifactorial inhibition of gluconeogenesis by ethanol—booze. Your friend was brought here in a comatose state and given glucose intravenously. He is coming around quite nicely.”

  Dr. Wallace, having finished his bewildering exposition, nodded and then left. He stopped once and called back: “By the way, only about eleven percent of untreated cases of this syndrome die. So don’t worry too much about your friend.”

  There were other humans on other cots, but I felt totally alone with Joseph Grablewski.

  I pulled a steel folding chair close to the cot and sat down. I was twelve inches from his face. It was sad . . . so indescribably sad. I was suffused with all kinds of bizarre guilt . . . as if somehow by not doing something I had put him there. Not become lovers? When? Years ago? Or now?

  “Look, he’s come to. He recognizes you,” Basillio said. The patient’s eyes were indeed flickering and he moved one of his arms down by his side. I noticed that there were tremors in his fingers and his tongue flicked in and out of the side of his mouth as if on a desperate search for water.

  “He’s trying to speak to you, Swede. Go closer to him, he’s trying to say something.”

  Yes, I could see that. I could see that he wanted to speak to me. It made me ambivalent. I wanted to be close to him . . . I wanted to run away. His plight was threatening me. His alcoholism sickened me.

  I touched him tentatively, on the hand, like he was a dying man and my gesture made me ashamed.

  Then I pressed my lips to his head and whispered, “I’m glad you’ll be okay.”

  He nodded feebly and twisted his head oddly.

  “He wants to tell you something,” Basillio said. “Put your ear by his mouth.”

  I did so and waited. I heard sounds but no words. Then, finally, he said something to me that I could retrieve. Then he seemed to collapse and lose consciousness.

  We walked out of the ward and onto the street. We stood there watching the traffic, watching the people enter and leave.

  “What did he say to you?” Basillio asked.

  “It was something odd. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “What?” Basillio was insistent.

  “He said . . . no, he asked: Did Constantin bite you?”

  Basillio laughed. “He was making fun of you. He remembered when you had asked him about those three Stanislavski disciples. Constantin was Stanislavski’s first name.”

  “I’m aware of his first name, Tony, it’s just that I don’t think Joseph Grablewski was making some kind of joke.”

  “Then what does it mean?”

  “He was trying to tell me something.”

  “Oh, come on, Swede, the man is in an alcoholic stupor.”

  I had to be careful. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of Basillio or anyone else when I discussed Joseph Grablewski. Even in a stupor the man upset me. He upset me . . . not his words. I had only a low-level buzz over “Did Constantin bite you?” Low-level but persistent, like an aching molar.

  “If he wasn’t making a joke, then who is Constantin?”

  “Is there a vodka called Constantin?” I asked Basillio.

  “I don’t think so. At least I’ve never heard of that brand. Maybe Grablewski thinks he’s Stanislavski.”

  “No, Tony, Grablewski knows he’s Grablewski, that’s his trouble.”

  “Well, look, Swede, I gotta get back to work. I’m sure your old friend will be okay. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thanks, Tony,” I said, and watched him walk downtown quickly, heading toward one of his copy shops.

  I didn’t go anywhere. I just lounged in front of the hospital. Grablewski’s stupid whispered comment was like a delayed-action fuse. When I’d first heard it, the words were meaningless. When I discussed it with Basillio, they began to nudge me. And now that I was alone, they were beginning to fester. What was he talking about? Did he mean Stanislavski? Bite me? Had I suffered some kind of attack or setback?

  Maybe he was talking about another man called Constantin. Maybe he was talking about a place. Maybe he was talking about a bar called Constantin. Or maybe he didn’t even know he was talking to me; maybe he thought he was talking to one of his drinking companions.

  I could not leave that stupid phrase alone. Maybe it was the residue of unrequited love. I could not leave it alone. Watch it fester, Alice, I thought to myself. I walked to the corner and stared at the hospital. Poor man . . . locked in there . . . people sticking things into his arm . . . people restraining him when he got violent—and all so that he could crawl back to that booth on Forty-fourth Street and start all over again.

  What was Constantin? Who was Constantin? Where was Constantin? What did the whispered words mean? Then, fifteen minutes after I left the hospital, I was headed uptown in a cab—my destination the same Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts that I had visited a short time ago with Basillio.

  I knew exactly where to look now for memoirs and histories of the Moscow Art Theatre. But this time I wasn’t looking for references to Bukai, Chederov, and Mallinova. I was looking for a single reference to a single name—Constantin.

  But all I could find were references to Constantin Stanislavski. No, I was sure it was another Constantin. I had the odd feeling as I flipped through the indexes that Joseph Grablewski was somewhere in the massive library, laughing at me, mocking me, guzzling his vodka.

  And then, in a single beat-up book published in English in 1948 by a Russian-émigré actor named Orlov, I found the indexed reference: “Constantin, cat.”

  It was on page 131 of the very bitter memoir.

  On that page Orlov recounted how Stanislavski was presented with a white cat named after him by his associates and this cat became a company favorite, not the least because it tended to bite.

  I started to laugh right there in the library, so loudly and with such abandon that one of the guards came over and asked me if I could moderate my behavior.

  It was impossible, so I had to run out of the library and calm down by the Henry Moore statue. It was bizarre and funny; imagine a line of white cats that began with a cat given to Stanislavski—and now sixty years later at least one of its progeny named Clara and two unknown siblings are hidden in a boarding pet store on Hudson Street after having been kidnapped by Bruce Chessler and then stolen back. And they are brought goodies by an eighty-five-year-old émigré. But why would Chessler hav
e kidnapped the cats in the first place?

  The whole thing was crazy, Grablewski was crazy. And for all I knew, Bukai was crazy.

  By the time I got home, I was totally exhausted. Risa had gone out and left me a note that she would be back in the late afternoon or early evening. I told Bushy and Pancho about the mysterious line of white cats . . . if indeed such a line existed.

  When I had finally showered and eaten and napped, I realized that I ought to at least follow up Grablewski’s clue. I pulled out the old programs from the Nikolai Group’s travels that Bruce Chessler had so lunatically defaced with his obscenities and carefully went through them searching for something Chessler might have written about Constantin the cat or Clara the cat or any white cat—past, present, or future.

  There was no such annotation. It was odd. If Chessler was so obsessed with the émigrés, he must have known that there existed some kind of émigré saying with a double entendre: “Constantin bite you?” There had to be such a saying, or else how could Joseph Grablewski know about it? And surely Chessler’s grandmother must have known about it and said something to her grandson about Constantin, Stanislavski’s cat.

  Well, one couldn’t force things. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there.

  Going through those old programs made me very sad. All those performances done and gone and forgotten. All those people in all those plays in all capacities—gone.

  I smiled as I saw the name of Maria Swoboda, my old teacher, so prominently displayed in the programs. And the pictures the émigrés had used! They were all so heroic! More like the photos of operatic tenors.

  I began to feel very reverently toward them. I started to stack them by date.

  In 1957 they had gone to Mexico City.

  In 1958 to Ecuador.

  In 1959 to Panama and Argentina.

  In 1960 to Venezuela.

  In 1961 to Nicaragua.

  In 1962 to Brazil and Costa Rica.

  In 1963 to El Salvador.

  In 1964 to Chile.

  In 1965 to Venezuela.

  In 1966 to Peru.

  In 1967 to Mexico City and Brazil.

  After I had stacked them by date, I realized it was very strange that the Nikolai Group had never performed in Europe, only in South and Central America.

  I suddenly became furious at myself for not having studied or even looked at the programs seriously before.

  There were many other peculiar facts about the Nikolai Group that emerged after one studied the programs.

  For example, in most of the years of their existence they made only one foreign trip each year—to one city in one country.

  This was very strange. No other theatrical group I was ever attached to did that. Small groups have to perform many times in many places in the shortest period of time in order to recoup their expenses. The Nikolai Group seemed to give command performances as if they were the Bolshoi Ballet—which they assuredly weren’t. How could they have afforded to fly to Buenos Aires, for example, and play in one theater for three nights and then fly back? What was the point artistically, anyway, forget financially?

  And there was something even stranger. In the years when they had visited two countries on the same trip, these countries were far apart. This also was unheard-of. European companies, for example, when they came to America to play New York and Boston and Washington, and perhaps Atlanta, always tried to schedule some performances in Montreal, because it was geographically feasible. They wouldn’t schedule Kingston, Jamaica.

  The itinerary of the Nikolai Group was in some way profoundly fake!

  I was so excited at what I had discovered about the programs that I started to pirouette about the living room with joy, until I realized that I wouldn’t even have picked up the programs again if the alcoholic Mr. Grablewski hadn’t whispered a cryptic comment in my ear.

  But the seven strands were indeed beginning to point toward a center. There were Constantin and his progeny—poor Clara. There was a surly diamond merchant. There was a theatrical group that seemed to have defied theatrical logic. There was a murdered young man obsessed by hatred. There were three ancient wealthy émigrés who met from time to time. There was an eccentric bohemian who had been a police informer before he was murdered. And the seventh strand was unrequited love—Chessler’s for me, and mine, at one time in the past, for Grablewski. For the first time since that young man had appeared on my landing I could see dimly toward the center—where the strands were leading.

  Oh, I had work to do—a lot of work—and some mice to catch. But I knew what I was going to do and I was quite sure where it was going to lead.

  I picked up the programs and placed them gingerly on the table. They seemed much heavier now. They were laden with relevance. They were the journeys of a theatrical group whose itinerary was so eccentric that it was obvious their art was diluted in the service of some other agenda. That agenda was the center on which the strands converged. I drank a third of a snifter of very elegant brandy. Bushy purred.

  20

  “Who?”

  “Me, John. Alice . . . Alice Nestleton.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Poor John Cerise. I was obviously one of the few people he didn’t want to hear from.

  “John, don’t worry. I’m not going to get you beat up again.”

  He laughed.

  “Are your wounds healed?” I asked. I realized I should be ashamed of myself for not calling him before, when he got home from the hospital.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Just a bit stiff.”

  There was an awkward pause. Then he asked: “Did you ever find that white cat . . . Carla?”

  “You mean Clara, John. Yes, she’s alive and well and living in a pet shop.”

  “There’s nothing like happy endings.”

  “Look, John, I need another favor from you,” I said.

  He laughed nervously.

  “I want to borrow one of your cats . . . one of your Abyssinians.”

  “Borrow a cat? Why, Alice?”

  “Well, it’s really too complicated to explain, but it’ll only be for a couple of days and I’ll take good care of it.”

  “But I thought you told me your cats don’t like visitors.”

  “Well, I won’t keep the cat at my apartment—at a friend’s.”

  “For how long, Alice?”

  “A few days. It’s just for some cat photographs for a friend of mine in advertising. He needs a beautiful Abyssinian and you have only beautiful Abyssinians.” I was only half lying to him. I did intend to take a photograph, but it was not really for advertising purposes. Or, rather, it was for a different kind of offering.

  “Well, Alice, how can I get the cat to you?”

  “My friend has a car. We’ll pick the cat up tomorrow morning . . . about ten . . . will ten be okay?”

  “Good. That will be good. Ten o’clock is fine. I’ll let you have Jack Be Quick,” he said.

  I hung up the phone. God bless you, John Cerise, I thought. He could always be trusted. Risa was on the sofa, playing an elaborate kind of hide-and-seek with Bushy. I smiled at both of them. I felt wonderful. Ever since I discovered that the Nikolai Group was not what it had appeared to be—that it must have had a very secret agenda—the pieces had been falling into place. I had been to the library many times, burying myself in back issues of newspapers and journals. I had a full-scale model of past, present, and future—but it had to be proved, and the cat from John Cerise was the first step.

  I walked, almost danced, to the window and stared down onto the street.

  Madame Swoboda would be proud of me now, I thought. For wasn’t that the essence of Method acting? One does not walk out onto a stage and begin to act. One walks out and speaks words or does motions and they are totally authentic because they come from authentic recollections and understanding of oneself. One doesn’t act—one is. One doesn’t fret in the wings, because there is nothing to fret about.

  “Why are you s
o happy?” I heard Risa ask.

  “Oh,” I said, “just middle-age mirth.”

  “And where do you go all the time lately? You’re never here.”

  “Research,” I replied, “research, inquiry, analysis, a little here, a little there.”

  She cocked her head like a cat. She didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “I think, Risa, that I’m very close to finding out why Bruce Chessler died,” I explained.

  She stopped asking questions. She pulled into herself. I had forgotten how she must have loved him; I had never believed her attempt to distance herself from him.

  About an hour later she seemed to revive. She said: “I think I’ll move back to my apartment tomorrow. I don’t want to interfere with your research, your analysis, your what-have-you,”

  Her voice was contemptuous. I didn’t rise to the bait. I didn’t want to argue with Risa about anything. Now she was furious for some reason, standing in the center of the room, her hands clenched on her waist. What kind of odd transference had she made to me?

  “Research, analysis . . . why do you say such stupid things? What does it have to do with Bruce’s murder? He’s dead . . . he’s off the planet . . . out of the universe . . . gone . . . dissipated . . . vanished. How can you find out why Bruce died? You didn’t even know him!”

  She spat her words out to me as if I were the mother who had betrayed her. Yes, it was time for the girl to go.

  “Are you sure that cat is not going to jump around?” Basillio asked in a nervous voice. He kept staring through the rearview mirror at the beautiful Abyssinian cat pressed against the backseat of the car, his back arched.

  “Don’t worry, Tony, he loves it there, he won’t bother you at all.”

  I was turned completely around, staring at the cat we had just picked up at John Cerise’s. His name, I remembered, was Jack Be Quick. It was a very good name for a cat. He had a ruddy-brown coat ticked with black, and green eyes. He was lithe, hard, muscular, and gave off those signals in movement that seemed to say: “Yes, I not only look like a miniature cougar, I can act like one if you don’t watch out.” Of course, it was just a joke. Abyssinians are very kindly pussycats—exotic, yes, but kind. And Jack Be Quick settled down very quickly, much to Tony’s relief.