Cat in Glass

by Nancy Etchemendy

  Mingled with the grasses, the lilies grew in rich abundance, their blossoms waving in the soft breeze like the bright faces of a throng.

  “Silver!” the young man murmured beside her. “They’re silver!”

  And indeed it was true. Even in the moon’s chilly light, Jacinth could see that the graceful lily trumpets bore no hint of orange or yellow. She laughed once more, softly this time, with wonder. She had made her own roads indeed. And they led to lilies such as no one in Aranho had ever seen before.

  Jacinth and the young hunter made a fire, caught fish and roasted them without speaking, for the lake and the lilies and the light of the moon cast a spell that words would have broken. When the fire had died to red coals and the hunter lay beside it, twitching in his sleep, Jacinth rested in the soft grass and looked up at the stars. Dearest Joth, she thought. I will be home soon, and I will bring with me greater treasure than I had ever hoped to find.

  In the morning, Jacinth left the hunter where he slept. She broke off a piece of journey bread and laid it in the grass beside him, as a sign of goodwill. Then she went about the happy business at hand. First she wove a basket from cattails. Root and all, she dug a single silver lily decked with two blossoms and several buds. This she planted in the basket with good loamy earth and water from the lake. With her bow slung across her shoulders and the lily cradled in one arm, she set off through the forest again, back the way she had come, following the notches she had cut into the trees.

  By afternoon, she reached the main road. Her heart was light as thistledown as she strode along, humming a tune and wondering idly what kinds of dyes could be made from the unfamiliar flowers she passed.

  Once, she heard voices. She crouched behind a boulder as two lily hunters trudged up the road toward the forest.

  Jacinth kept silent until they had passed. Then she continued toward home, whistling.

  She reached Aranho on the evening of the eighth day. Though she was tired and hungry and her body ached, she stepped proudly along the main street. The lily, snug in its basket of soft, moist earth, glowed softly in the dusk, still as fresh as it had been on the morning when she dug it. As she passed, curious citizens thrust their heads from windows or walked out onto their doorsteps to whisper with their neighbors. It was not the usual greeting reserved for the first returnee from the lily hunt. Nevertheless, she noticed the onlookers much less than she noticed the familiar stone houses and straw roofs. Whatever its shortcomings, Aranho was her home, and she was glad to be back.

  Through the purple twilight she marched to the door of the cobbler’s shop. Joth opened it as she raised her hand to knock. His face was as luminous as the lily.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” he said as they stepped into the street on their way to Jacinth’s cottage. “About a lame cobbler who fell in love with a one-eyed weaver.”

  She laughed. “I already know that one. I’ll tell you one even better. About a weaver who traveled all the way to the sea and back just to find out that all she really wanted was to marry a cobbler and live the rest of her life in the town where she was born.”

  Joth gazed at her merrily as he swung along on his crutches, his eyebrows arched in mock surprise. “All the way to the sea?”

  “Oh yes. It took that great a distance,” she replied.

  And they laughed and sighed together as Jacinth began to tell him all that she had seen.

  Later, they lay together on the soft straw of her pallet before a small fire in the house she had built with her own hands. She held Joth close to her as he slept. She gazed drowsily at her warm, familiar room. There was the loom, and the thick window above it, and the baskets of many-colored yarn. There was the lily. She would plant it tomorrow, in the cool sheltered light on the east side of the cottage. In a shadowy corner, the unfinished tapestry stood waiting, as if today were no different from any other.

  Quietly, she rose and began to thread it back onto the loom.

  CAT IN GLASS

  I was once a respectable woman. Oh yes, I know that’s what they all say when they’ve reached a pass like mine: I was well educated, well traveled, had lovely children and a nice husband with a good financial mind. How can anyone have fallen so far, except one who deserved to anyway? I’ve had time aplenty to consider the matter, lying here eyeless in this fine hospital bed while the stench of my wounds increases. The matrons who guard my room are tight-lipped. But I heard one of them whisper yesterday, when she thought I was asleep, “Jesus, how could anyone do such a thing?” The answer to all these questions is the same. I have fallen so far, and I have done what I have done, to save us each and every one from the Cat in Glass.

  My entanglement with the cat began fifty-two years ago, when my sister, Delia, was attacked by an animal. It happened on an otherwise ordinary spring afternoon. There were no witnesses. My father was still in his office at the college, and I was dawdling along on my way home from first grade at Chesly Girls’ Day School, counting cracks in the sidewalk. Delia, younger than I by three years, was alone with Fiona, the Irishwoman who kept house for us. Fiona had just gone outside for a moment to hang laundry. She came in to check on Delia and discovered a scene of almost unbelievable carnage. Oddly, she had heard no screams.

  As I ran up the steps and opened our door, I heard screams indeed. Not Delia’s—for Delia had nothing left to scream with—but Fiona’s, as she stood in the front room with her hands over her eyes. She couldn’t bear the sight. Unfortunately, six-year-olds have no such compunction. I stared long and hard, sick and trembling, yet entranced.

  From the shoulders up, Delia was no longer recognizable as a human being. Her throat had been shredded and her jaw ripped away. Most of her hair and scalp were gone. There were long, bloody furrows in the creamy skin of her arms and legs. The organdy pinafore in which Fiona had dressed her that morning was clotted with blood, and the blood was still coming. Some of the walls were even spattered with it where the animal, whatever it was, had worried her in its frenzy. Her fists and heels banged jerkily against the floor. Our pet dog, Freddy, lay beside her, also bloody, but quite limp. Freddy’s neck was broken.

  I remember slowly raising my head—I must have been in shock by then—and meeting the bottomless gaze of the glass cat that sat on the hearth. Our father, a professor of art history, was very proud of this sculpture, for reasons I did not understand until many years later. I only knew it was valuable and we were not allowed to touch it. A chaotic feline travesty, it was not the sort of thing you would want to touch anyway. Though basically catlike in shape, it bristled with transparent threads and shards. There was something at once wild and vaguely human about its face. I had never liked it much, and Delia had always been downright frightened of it. On this day, as I looked up from my little sister’s ruins, the cat seemed to glare at me with bright, terrifying satisfaction.

  I had experienced, a year before, the thing every child fears most: the death of my mother. It had given me a kind of desperate strength, for I thought, at the tender age of six, that I had survived the worst life had to offer. Now, as I returned the mad stare of the glass cat, it came to me that I was wrong. The world was a much more evil place than I had ever imagined, and nothing would ever be the same again.

  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 alw
ays 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:

  To whom it may concern:

  This box contains a sculpture, Cat in Glass, designed and executed by the late Alexander Chelichev. Because of Chelichev’s standing as a noted forerunner of Dadaism, a historical account of Cat’s genesis may be of interest to scholars.

  I purchased Cat from the artist himself at his Zürich loft in December 1915, two months before the violent rampage which resulted in his confinement in a hospital for the criminally insane, and well before his artistic importance was widely recognized. (For the record, the asking price was forty-eight Swiss francs, plus a good meal with wine.) It is known that Chelichev had a wife and two children elsewhere in the city at that time, though he lived with them only sporadically. The following is the artist’s statement about Cat in Glass, transcribed as accurately as possible from a conversation held with me during dinner.

  “I have struggled with the devil all my life. He wants no rules. No order. His presence is everywhere in my work. I was beaten as a child, and when I became strong enough, I killed my father for it. I see you are skeptical, but it is true. Now I am a grown man and I find my father in myself. I have a wife and children, but I spend little time with them because I fear the father-devil in me.
I do not beat my children. Instead I make this cat. Into the glass I have poured this madness of mine. Better there than in the eyes of my daughters.”

  It is my belief that Cat in Glass was Chelichev’s last finished creation.

  Sincerely,

  Lawrence Waters

  Professor of Art History

  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.”