He studied his face in the mirror for a moment because he liked the way he looked. He could see his mother in his face. He had her blond hair, so pale it was almost white, and her sea-blue eyes. His face was all hard planes and strong features, with none of her beauty or gentleness, though his full mouth was as generous as hers.
As he undressed, he avoided looking down at himself. He was proud of his powerful shoulders and arms, his broad chest, and his muscular legs, but even catching a glimpse of the sex thing made him feel dirty and mildly ill. He sat on the toilet to make water, so he wouldn’t have to touch himself. During his shower, when he soaped his crotch, he first pulled on a mitten that he had sewn from a pair of washcloths, so the flesh of his hand would not have to touch the wicked flesh below.
When he had dried off and dressed—athletic socks, running shoes, dark gray cords, black shirt—he hesitantly left the reliable shelter of his mother’s old room. Night had fallen, and the upstairs hall was poorly lit by two low-wattage bulbs in a ceiling fixture that was coated with gray dust and missing half its pendant crystals. To his left was the head of the staircase. To his right were his sisters’ room, his old room, and the other bath, the doors to which stood open; no lights were on back there. The oak floor creaked, and the threadbare runner did little to soften his footsteps. He sometimes thought he should give the rest of the house a thorough cleaning, maybe even spring for some new carpeting and fresh paint; however, though he kept his mother’s room spotless and in good repair, he was not motivated to spend time or money on the rest of the house, and his sisters had little interest in—or talent for—homemaking.
A flurry of soft footfalls alerted him to the approach of the cats, and he stopped short of the stairs, afraid of treading on one of their paws or tails as they poured into the upstairs hall. A moment later they streamed over the top step and swarmed around him: twenty-six of them, if his most recent count was not out of date. Eleven were black, several more were chocolate-brown or tobacco-brown or charcoal-gray, two were deep gold, and only one was white. Violet and Verbina, his sisters, preferred dark cats, the darker the better.
The animals milled around him, walking over his shoes, rubbing against his legs, curling their tails around his calves. Among them were two Angoras, an Abyssinian, a tailless Manx, a Maltese, and a tortoiseshell, but most were mongrel cats of no easily distinguished lineage. Some had green eyes, some yellow, some silver-gray, some blue, and they all regarded him with great interest. Not one of them purred or me-owed; their inspection was conducted in absolute silence.
Candy did not particularly like cats, but he tolerated these not only because they belonged to his sisters but because, in a way, they were virtually an extension of Violet and Verbina. To have hurt them, to have spoken harshly to them, would have been the same as striking out at his sisters, which he could never do because his mother, on her deathbed, had admonished him to provide for the girls and protect them.
In less than a minute the cats had fulfilled their mission and, almost as one, turned from him. With much swishing of tails and flexing of feline muscles and rippling of fur, they flowed like a single beast to the head of the stairs and down.
By the time he reached the first step, they were at the landing, turning, slipping out of sight. He descended to the lower hall, and the cats were gone. He passed the lightless and musty-smelling parlor. The odor of mildew drifted out of the study, where shelves were filled with the moldering romance novels that his mother had liked so much, and when he passed through the dimly lit dining room, litter crunched under his shoes.
Violet and Verbina were in the kitchen. They were identical twins. They were equally blond, with the same fair and faultless skin, with the same china-blue eyes, smooth brows, high cheekbones, straight noses with delicately carved nostrils, lips that were naturally red without lipstick, and small even teeth as bone-white as those of their cats.
Candy tried to like his sisters, and failed. For his mother’s sake he could not dislike them, so he remained neutral, sharing the house with them but not as a real family might share it. They were too thin, he thought, fragile-looking, almost frail, and too pale, like creatures that infrequently saw the sun—which in fact seldom warmed them, since they rarely went outside. Their slim hands were well manicured, for they groomed themselves as constantly as if they, too, were cats; but, to Candy, their fingers seemed excessively long, unnaturally flexible and nimble. Their mother had been robust, with strong features and good color, and Candy often wondered how such a vital woman could have spawned this pallid pair.
The twins had piled up cotton blankets, six thick, in one corner of the big kitchen, to make a large area where the cats could lie comfortably, though the padding was actually for Violet and Verbina, so they could sit on the floor among the cats for hours at a time. When Candy entered the room, they were on the blankets, with cats all around them and in their laps. Violet was filing Verbina’s fingernails with an emery board. Neither of them looked up, though of course they had already greeted him through the cats. Verbina had never spoken a word within Candy’s hearing, not in her entire twenty-five years—the twins were four years younger than he was—but he was not sure whether she was unable to talk, merely unwilling to talk, or shy of talking only when around him. Violet was nearly as silent as her sister, but she did speak when necessary; apparently, at the moment, she had nothing that needed to be said.
He stood by the refrigerator, watching them as they huddled over Verbina’s pale right hand, grooming it, and he supposed that he was unfair in his judgment of them. Other men might find them attractive in a strange way. Though, to him, their limbs seemed too thin, other men might see them as supple and erotic, like the legs of dancers and the arms of acrobats. Their skin was clear as milk, and their breasts were full. Because he was blessedly free of any interest in sex, he was not qualified to judge their appeal.
They habitually wore as little as possible, as little as he would tolerate before ordering them to put on more clothes. They kept the house excessively warm in winter, and most often dressed—as now—in T-shirts and short shorts or panties, barefoot and bare-limbed. Only his mother’s room, which was now his, was kept cooler, because he had closed the vents up there. Without his presence to demand a degree of modesty, they would have roamed the house in the nude.
Lazily, lazily, Violet filed Verbina’s thumbnail, and they both stared at it as intently as if the meaning of life was to be read in the curve of the half-moon or the arc of the nail itself.
Candy raided the refrigerator, removing a chunk of canned ham, a package of Swiss cheese, mustard, pickles, and a quart of milk. He got bread from one of the cupboards and sat in a railback chair at the age-yellowed table.
The table, chairs, cabinets, and woodwork had once been glossy white, but they had not been painted since before his mother died. They were yellow-white now, gray-white in the seams and corners, crackle-finished by time. The daisy-patterned wallpaper was soiled and, in a couple of places, peeling along the seams, and the chintz curtains hung limp with grease and dust.
Candy made and consumed two thick ham-and-cheese sandwiches. He gulped the milk straight from the carton.
Suddenly all twenty-six cats, which had been sprawling languidly around the twins, sprang up simultaneously, proceeded to the pet door in the bottom of the larger kitchen door, and went outside in orderly fashion. Time to make their toilet, evidently. Violet and Verbina didn’t want the house smelling of litter boxes.
Candy closed his eyes and took a long swallow of milk. He would have preferred it at room temperature or even slightly warm. It tasted vaguely like blood, though not as pleasantly pungent; it would have been more like blood if it had not been chilled.
Within a couple of minutes the cats returned. Now Verbina was lying on her back, with her head propped on a pillow, eyes closed, lips moving as if talking to herself, though no sound issued from her. She extended her other slender hand so her sister could meticulously file those nails too. Her long legs were spread, and Candy could see between her smooth thighs. She was wearing only a T-shirt and flimsy peach-colored panties that defined rather than concealed the cleft of her womanhood. The silent cats swarmed to her, draped themselves over her, more concerned about propriety than she was, and they regarded Candy accusatorily, as if they knew that he’d been staring.
He lowered his eyes and studied the crumbs on the table.
Violet said, “Frankie was here.”
At first he was more surprised by the fact that she had spoken than by what she had said. Then the meaning of those three words reverberated through him as if he were a brass gong struck by a mallet. He stood up so abruptly that he knocked over his chair. “He was here? In the house?”
Neither the cats nor Verbina twitched at the crash of the chair or the sharpness of his voice. They lay somnolent, indifferent.
“Outside,” Violet said, still sitting on the floor beside her reclining sister, working on the other twin’s nails. She had a low, almost whispery voice. “Watching the house from the Eugenia hedge.”
Candy glanced at the night beyond the windows. “When?”
“Around four o’clock.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“He wasn’t here long. He’s never here long. A minute or two, then he goes. He’s afraid.”
“You saw him?”
“I knew he was there.”
“You didn’t try to stop him from leaving?”
“How could I?” She sounded irritable now, but her voice was no less seductive than it had been. “The cats went after him, though.”
“Did they hurt him?”
“A little. Not bad. But he killed Samantha.”
“Who?”
“Our poor little puss. Samantha.”
Candy did not know the cats’ names. They had always seemed to be not just a pack of cats but a single creature, most often moving as one, apparently thinking as one.
“He killed Samantha. Smashed her head against one of the stone pilasters at the end of the walk.” At last Violet looked up from her sister’s hand. Her eyes seemed to be a paler blue than before, icy. “I want you to hurt him, Candy. I want you to hurt him real bad, the way he hurt our cat. I don’t care if he is our brother—”
“He isn’t our brother any more, not after what he did,” Candy said furiously.
“I want you to do to him what he did to our poor Samantha. I want you to smash him, Candy, I want you to crush his head, crack his skull open until his brains ooze out.” She continued to speak softly, but he was riveted by her words. Sometimes, like now, when her voice was even more sensuous than usual, it seemed not merely to play upon his ears but to slither into his head, where it lay gently on his brain, like a mist, a fog. “I want you to pound him, hit him and tear him until he’s just splintered bones and ruptured guts, and I want you to rip out his eyes. I want him to be sorry he hurt Samantha.”
Candy shook himself. “If I get my hands on him, I’ll kill him, all right, but not because of what he did to your cat. Because of what he did to our
mother.
Don’t you remember what he did to her? How can you worry about getting revenge for a cat when we still haven’t made him pay for our mother, after seven long years?”
She looked stricken, turned her face from him, and fell silent.
The cats flowed off Verbina’s recumbent form.
Violet stretched out half atop her sister, half beside her. She put her head on Verbina’s breasts. Their bare legs were entwined.
Rising part of the way out of her trancelike state, Verbina stroked her sister’s silken hair.
The cats returned and cuddled against both twins wherever there was a warm hollow to welcome them.
“Frank was here,” Candy said aloud but largely to himself, and his hands curled into tight fists.
A fury grew in him, like a small turning wheel of wind far out on the sea but soon to whirl itself into a hurricane. However, rage was an emotion he dared not indulge; he must control himself. A storm of rage would water the seeds of his dark need. His mother would approve of killing Frank, for Frank had betrayed the family; his death would benefit the family. But if Candy let his anger at his brother swell into a rage, then was unable to find Frank, he would have to kill someone else, because the need would be too great to deny. His mother, in Heaven, would be ashamed of him, and for a while she would turn her face from him and deny that she had ever given birth to him.
Looking up at the ceiling, toward the unseen sky and the place at God’s court where his mother dwelled, Candy said, “I’ll be okay. I won’t lose control. I won’t.”
He turned from his sisters and the cats, and he went outside to see if any trace of Frank remained near the Eugenia hedge or at the pilaster where he’d killed Samantha.
19
BOBBY
AND Julie ate dinner at Ozzie’s, in Orange, then shifted to the adjoining bar. The music was provided by Eddie Day, who had a smooth, supple voice; he played contemporary stuff but also tunes from the fifties and early sixties. It wasn’t Big Band, but some early rock-and-roll had a swing beat. They could swing to numbers like “Dream Lover,” rumba to “La Bamba,” and cha-cha to any disco ditty that crept into Eddie’s repertoire, so they had a good time.
Whenever possible, Julie liked to go dancing after she visited Thomas at Cielo Vista. In the thrall of the music, keeping time to the beat, focused on the patterns of the dance, she was able to put everything else out of her mind—even guilt, even grief. Nothing else freed her so completely. Bobby liked to dance, too, especially swing. Tuck in, throw out, change places, sugar-push, do a tight whip, tuck in again, throw out, trade places with both hands linked, back to basic position ... Music soothed, but dance had the power to fill the heart with joy and to numb those parts of it that were bruised.