The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  “This.” She gestured in all directions. “Is this surrealism in everyday life? Instant despair? Are you a black humorist living it up? Or a do-it-yourself God knows what? Or is it just the put-on to end all put-ons?”

  “It’s just home,” he said.

  “Is it the new irreverence?”

  “It’s just home.”

  “Why don’t you get a good cleaning woman?”

  “Can you recommend one?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But make sure you straighten the place up before she gets here.” Mrs. Seltzer closed the notebook and tucked it into her briefcase. “No Raymond, and I’ve got to go. Well, I’ll call again in a few days. Meanwhile I won’t make any report. Please don’t trouble. I’ll shovel my own way to the door.”

  She had not intended to look back. But finding he had followed her out onto the front porch, she paused and turned. She was about to say something when he interrupted her. There was a dead bird on the top step, perhaps deposited there by some neighborhood cat. He brushed it into the weeds with his toe. “Nature is a slob,” he said. “Have you ever thought that we spend most of our time mopping up after her?”

  “Most of us at any rate.” She appraised him abruptly again, as best she could through fluttering lids. “You’re biting down on an aching tooth, aren’t you?” She paused only long enough to see that he was not going to answer. “But if so, whatever it is, I’ll play a hunch. Whatever happened, you brought it on yourself. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re too rich for my blood, because you aren’t. My most vivid childhood recollection is of my father with his mouth wired shut after a dentist broke his jawbone pulling three impacted teeth. It was wired shut tight, so that all the nourishment he could take in was liquid, through a straw.”

  “I knew a woman like that once.”

  “I’m not finished. One day some soup he drank didn’t agree with him. He was nauseated, and not with the universe. You can imagine the crisis. Another man in our home town went out one night to a compost heap he had spent ten years building up, immaculately dressed in white tie and tails, and with a bullet from a pistol added himself to it. So I mean it’s tough on you romantics. There’s always somebody who’s gone you one better. You will always be topped. Despair is a losing game.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Oh, I think I’ll drop in on the Collier brothers. See you later.”

  She marched down the stairs to a rather worn looking Chevrolet sedan, and he watched her get in and drive off without looking back.

  Tattersall now regularly took the idiot boy and the drunken dog with him on his rounds. The boy would trail him, and the dog the boy, at widening intervals as the day wore on. Tattersall himself rarely tired. He swung his suitcase briskly as he strode along. Together with the cans of fresh air, he had taken on one other item. It was a NO PEDDLERS ALLOWED sign, with which he did a lively business, especially in the large apartment houses springing up everywhere. The boy managed to hold his own fairly well, and Tattersall thought the exercise was good for him. It was the dog who had trouble keeping up the pace. He was now a regular lush. He drank like a fish every night, and every morning needed a good belt to pull himself together. He declined faster than the outdoor air and sunshine could build him up. Still, for a time, Tattersall insisted he tag along. Sunny days, that year, again lingered on well into autumn, and Tattersall found them bracing as he walked along under the weeping oaks and maples. He made a decent living—enough for rent, food, clothes, and something left over.

  There came a time when the dog could no longer make it. He got so stewed every night that he was good for nothing till noon but sleeping it off. When Tattersall with held liquor from him, he made Tattersall’s life miserable, barking and yapping and nipping at his legs till given another drink. Or he would go upstairs and pull the bedcovers off of him. All this posed a problem, serious when the dog was home alone in a locked house. Tattersall solved it by installing something he often saw on his rounds. It was one of those “dog doors” which are fitted into the lower half of a house door, through which small animals can push their way in and out at will without the door itself being opened. The kind he inserted in the kitchen door was a panel of triangular plastic wedges converging to a point like the slices of a pie, which could be pushed open either way from the center, after which it closed automatically. Tattersall spent the best part of a week shoving the dog back and forth through it in an effort to make him understand what it was all about, for his faculties had become dulled by drink. “Will you get in there, for Christ’s sake! Now get out, can’t you!”

  One Saturday morning a large crate arrived from Sherry. It contained what she thought might fairly be considered his half of their wedding presents. She had written him asking what he would like to have, and he had replied telling her to keep everything. That had not satisfied her, and she had taken it upon herself to divide things up as equitably as she could. He received some assorted silver, including flatware, an electric clock, a cocktail shaker, and several exquisite Venetian glasses sent over from a European relative of his. There was a lace tablecloth from a Boston aunt. And everything they had brought back from their summer abroad when he had been a street singer.

  Tattersall cooked a rousing dinner for a beautifully set table. It was ham hocks and sauerkraut, a long-time favorite. Into his Venetian goblet he poured some properly chilled rosé, into the idiot’s a soft drink called Slurp. Great dripping clumps of sauerkraut were heaped on the Wedgwood plates with carved silver tongs, also used to drop ice cubes into their tinkling tumblers.

  “Fine crystal is one of the world’s joys,” Tattersall mused. He snicked the rim of his wineglass with a fingernail to make it give off a delicate musical ring. “And to think it all began in the sand beside the sea. Have you wondered who that first man was, centuries ago, who by accident noticed what fire did to those tiny glittering flakes along the shore? The man who created glass.”

  He paused to pour another dollop of beer into the Steuben bowl at which the dog guzzled.

  “Anything so subtly reminiscent of ice is an odd end-product of fire, isn’t it. But then it’s all part of the quintessential paradox of existence itself. I see ceramics is one of the subjects in the course of lectures at the library this winter. We must get season tickets. Someone else is speaking on Chopin. Chopin has always seemed to me a kind of audible crystal. What is it, Raymond?”

  The boy was pointing to the window, gargling vehemently as he did so. Tattersall looked in time to see a face withdrawn from it. He ran outside, but by the time he got there the intruder had vanished. There wasn’t a sign of life anywhere, only the rustle of trees and the play of their shadows around the streetlamp.

  He shrugged and went back to the house. “Nobody there,” he said. They returned to their meal. But he had scarcely sat down when the front doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Seltzer.

  “I was just going by,” she said, “and thought I’d drop in. I’m supposed to keep looking you over without warning. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. We’re just having dinner. Won’t you join us?” he said. “If you’ve already eaten, you might like a glass of wine, or some coffee later. I’ve baked a chocolate soufflé.”

  “What in?”

  “In the oven, naturally. Come here.”

  He beckoned her on into the kitchen, where, with the aid of two hotpads, he drew from the oven a red Dansk casserole.

  Some treasures I’ve just inherited. From myself,” he added, with an odd laugh. “Look at this coffeepot. Have you ever seen more beautifully carved silver, or a more graceful teak handle? But give me your coat, and then come sit down. How does that verse of Edna Millay’s go? There shall be plates a-plenty, and mugs to melt the chill, of all the gray-eyed people who happen up the hill.”

  Tattersall nudged a third chair up to the table, at which Mrs. Seltzer was already admiring the lace cloth, and poured out another glass of rose. After splashing some more Slu
rp into Raymond’s glass he took his seat. Mrs. Seltzer glanced down at the bowl the dog had been drinking out of.

  “Isn’t that Steuben?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Some people sure know how to live. I couldn’t eat another thing, thanks, just the wine. Ham hocks. You like them? They’re a special taste. I had an uncle who was insane about them.”

  “God gives us ham hocks for our bodies, hollyhocks for our souls.”

  “Yes, I know. Cheers.”

  He tempted Mrs. Seltzer with a little sauerkraut, which he had fixed with fragments of lean bacon and slices of crisp water chestnuts. She was lavish in her praise of it, and asked for the recipe. All this while the phonograph had been going, and though it was playing low and in another room, Tattersall now found it to be interfering with the conversation, and he went to turn it off.

  “Works a lot better since it’s been fixed, doesn’t it?” he said to the boy when he came back. “Even Delius sounds better.” Mrs. Seltzer quickly emptied her glass, which Tattersall as nimbly refilled. “We normally find Delius a little treacly,” he explained to her as he did so, “but not this piece. A rather interesting man, by all accounts. For all his plaintiveness and sweetness he was apparently a forbidding man. One of the great detesters, in Nietzsche’s phrase. I suppose all misanthropes have that soft streak in them.…”

  Mrs. Seltzer found her tongue on the third glass.

  “Misanthropes all hate themselves,” she said, addressing herself to the boy also, in an evident determination to show that two could play at this game. “We think of the world what we think of ourselves. The question about a beef is always how legitimate is it. I had a teacher who was a Frost nut, and he used to quote Frost on the distinction between griefs and grievances. Griefs shut up—these are my words now. Grievances—now I can’t even remember what he said. Oh, well.” She sighed and lowered her head into her hand. Then she immediately raised it again and said, “No, let me put it my way then. Grievances are less worthy, though they’re what generally make themselves heard. I think the truer it is that Everything Stinks the less one should call it to others’ attention. Quiet is requested for the benefit of other patients. These people—they can’t forgive God for not existing. I’m sure you’ve known people like that,” she continued to the boy, who was smiling down at the dog, who sat begging beside the table. “We all do. They gorge themselves on Nothing. They can’t get enough of Nothing. They can’t suck enough out of that Existentialist tit. They cozy up to it till they’re glutted, they’re drooling, it’s running down their chin. It’s the old Dusty Answer deal. But this Someone they can’t forgive for not existing, neither can they stop going on to him, or it. Don’t try to divert me with beauty, they say. Don’t try to buy me off with spring flowers, or young May moons, or falling snow. I want to stay mad.”

  She held out her glass to be refilled, and after Tattersall had emptied what remained of the bottle into it, she resumed.

  “There are two ways of doing it. Two possible attitudes to take, you see. Some rub it out. That’s suicide. The other type want to do the opposite. They want to rub it in. They want to live as long as possible, to rub all of it in they can. They know it’ll be rubbed into them in the end, as it is into everybody, but they do want to get in as much rubbing in as they can while the rubbing in is good. I know somebody like that, and I think you do too. His tack is simple. His program. He is self-destructive, up to a point. He does want to stick around, though he knows what you’re stuck with as long as you do. He wants to eat his cake and have it too. He will commit as much suicide as possible without killing himself.”

  Mrs. Seltzer had apparently finished. She sat back and looked at her wine, though without holding it aloft by the stem. It simply sat on the table. Tattersall pushed his chair back to get the soufflé. When he returned from the kitchen with it, she was still staring at her wineglass, and he imagined that her eyes were moist, though it was hard to tell because of her idiosyncrasy. She had been talking to the boy, but much more softly and in an altogether different tone. She put her hand over his as she said: “So all in all you will probably find it a lot better there again, the way you did before. You remember. In the Home, where there is so much more company, and so many other children your age to play with, and help each other, and all. You’ll have lots more fun there. Truly you will.”

  Tattersall set the casserole on a trivet and dished up three helpings of the steaming chocolate. He poured thick cream over it from a cut-glass pitcher and passed it around.

  Mrs. Seltzer gave a murmur of appreciation even before she had swallowed her first spoonful. “My God, this is terrific,” she said. “It’s absolutely wonderful.” Tattersall saw that the tears were in fact rolling down her cheeks.

  Thirteen

  Winter took the city by surprise. It arrived suddenly one November afternoon, following a spell of fine weather.

  It had been an average day for Tattersall, with its spot of color here and there such as sometimes made his daily rounds mildly memorable. A jolly woman weighing at least three hundred pounds had once bought everything he had in his suitcase to distribute as favors for a party she was throwing. That morning, an old woman so gnarled with rheumatism she could hardly get to the door had listened to his sales spiel, then, holding a can doubtfully in her bony fingers, had hesitated a moment. “How do I know the air in here is fresh?” she said. “I’ll stake my professional reputation on it,” Tattersall said. She finally bought one, creaking off and returning with a bag from which she dug a fifty-cent piece. Pocketing the coin, Tatersall shook his head at the awfulness of life as he descended the stairs. Pity was important to him now. He had wanted to knock the old lady down as a means of eliciting it. A stray mutt had next followed him for several blocks, perhaps with a view to adopting him. As he often had with his own dog, Tattersall rambled reminiscently on to it as it traipsed at his heels, recalling the days of his greatness and the feats that had checkered them. “… so I says to de Pope, listen, wise ass. …” At length the dog left him, turning up a side street. Tattersall was reduced to talking to himself, a thing which he did not mind except that, in the role of listener, his attention often wandered. There were times when he didn’t hear a word he said.

  The gray of the sky abruptly darkened, and then it began to snow. Thick wet flakes silently, dreamily descended upon boughs that had not quite yet shed the gold of their leaves. By evening the world was white. As he always did with the first snowfall, he remembered the poem of that name from everyone’s childhood. “The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night …”

  Each of us has a single, special memory, cherished as our most beautiful, the key to our past; or if not that, at least the embodiment of all we yearn to unlock. Not the earliest recollection soiled with explanation by the psychologists, but the memory of some particular bliss heartbreaking to recall, safe from contradiction, which is perhaps the memory of purity itself. This is no doubt why snow is always evocative of childhood. Tattersall’s great sweet memory was not an event, it was this poem. He remembered having to recite it before the class, and of doing so, but what he treasured was not the recollection of success, but the verses themselves and what they communicated. The fluttering flakes seemed like an enormous shuttling loom from which the whole tapestry of childhood was rewoven: the hope and fear of school, the poetry of the hours, the secrecy of dreams, all suspended in some eternal playtime. The silence deep and white, the rails softened to swansdown, the sheds new-roofed with Carrara, from which came chanticleer’s muffled crow, all this was once again evoked by the magical product of skies that would seem incapable of shedding anything but soot.

  After dinner he drew on his overshoes, bundled himself into a sweater, and went for a walk. He made the dog come along. He thought the invigorating air as well as the exercise would do him good. Indeed the dog did find it exhilarating at first, frisking about in the snow, but soon the excitement wore off, and he trotted relu
ctantly at Tattersall’s heels the rest of the hike. Tattersall was surprised to see how much more thickly the snow was falling than when he had come in out of it, and how much colder it was. After half a mile or so he began to think about the warm house himself, and he turned back, to find how biting the wind was now that he had it in his face instead of at his back. It stung his cheeks and eyes, and blew in sharp gusts around his feet and even up his trouser legs. He held a corner of his muffler to his mouth, and puffed along. Nearly four inches had fallen by now. It was turning into a blizzard. There was nobody else abroad. Most of the few cars out were foundering or stalled. He glanced enviously at house windows, their golden glow veiled in swirling white. He was glad to get home.

  When he did, it was to find the front door locked. He had forgotten to take a key, or had assumed Raymond would let him in. There was no response, however, to the bell, or when he banged on the door. “He’s watching television,” Tattersall said to the dog. “Let’s go around the back way.”

  That locked door was thumped with no better luck. He pounded it with both fists, calling the boy’s name. Nothing happened. He peered into the kitchen window. The house was fully lighted, but there was no sign of activity. He could hear nothing. Not that the television would be audible there, since the set was upstairs.

  He went down the stairs into the yard. There was a light on in the room where the television set was, and Tattersall made some snowballs and threw them at the window. They brought no face to it. “Damn,” he said, and tramped back up the stairs to the porch again. The kitchen window was latched, and he was about to break it and climb in when he thought of something else. He thought of the dog door, and it gave him an inspiration.

  “You go in and bark at him,” he said to the dog, who for some reason had not yet taken advantage of the access available to him, preferring to follow Tattersall on his mysterious activities. “You know—like Lassie. Woof, woof! Wrrroof! Upstairs. Tell him something is wrong, wroof, wroof! Then down again. Bring him here. Show them how smart you are. Get Raymond.” He supplemented these instructions with a vigorous illustrative pantomime. “Go!” he concluded, and started the dog through the door with a push.