The Cat's Pajamas (4 page)

“Alice, Robert, Madeline!” the echoes blew in the unlit halls.

“Mr. Robert!”

The maid's voice summoned him from the floor, trembling.

Then, one by one, they heard the maid cry out. One small dismayed and accusing cry.

After that the snow touched the roof of the house softly.

They all stood, knowing what that silence meant. They waited for some new sound.

Someone, treading slowly on nightmare softness, as if barefoot, drifted along the halls. They felt the house shift with the weight now here, now there, now farther along.

Two phones stood on a far library desk. Alice seized one, chattered the hook, cried, “Operator! Police!”

But then she remembered:
No one will call Madeline and me now. Tell the Bell Company to pull the phone. There's no one in town we know.

Be practical,
Mother had said.
Leave the phone itself here, in case we ever decide to reconnect.

“Operator!”

She threw the instrument down and blinked at it as if it were some stubborn beast she had asked to do the simplest trick. She glanced at the window. Push it up, lean out,
scream
! Ah, but the neighbors were locked in, warm and apart and separate and lost, and the wind screaming, too, and winter all around, and night. It would be like shouting to graveyards.

“Robert, Alice, Madeline, Robert, Alice, Madeline!”

The mother, screaming, blind idiocy.

“Lock my door! Robert, Alice, Madeline!”

I hear, thought Alice. We all hear. And
he'll
hear her too.

She grabbed the second phone, gave its button three sharp jabs.

“Madeline, Alice, Robert!” Her voice blew through the halls.

“Mother!” cried Alice over the phone. “Don't scream, don't tell him where you
are,
don't tell him what he doesn't even know!” Alice jabbed the button again.

“Robert, Alice, Madeline!”

“Pick up the phone, Mother, please, pick—”

Click.

“Hello, Operator.” Her mother's raw shrieking voice. “Save me! The locks!”

“Mother, this is Alice! Quiet, he'll hear you!”

“Oh, God! Alice, oh God, the door! I can't get out of bed! Silly, awful, all the locks and no way to get
to
them!”

“Put out your lamp!”

“Help me, Alice!”

“I am helping. Listen! Find your gun. Blow out your light. Hide under your bed!
Do
that!”

“Oh, God! Alice, come lock my door!”

“Mother, listen!”

“Alice, Alice!” Madeline's voice. “What's happened? I'm afraid!”

Another voice. “Alice!”

“Robert!”

They shrieked and yelled.

“No,” said Alice. “Quiet, one at a time! Before it's too late.
All
of us. Do you
hear
? Get your guns, open your doors, come out in the hall. It's us,
all
of us, against him. Yes?!”

Robert sobbed.

Madeline wailed.

“Alice, Madeline, children, save your mother!”

“Mother, shut up!” Alice swayed and chanted. “Open your doors.
All
of us. We can
do
it! Now!”

“He'll get me!” screamed Madeline.

“No, no,” said Robert. “It's no use, no use!”

“The door, my door, unlocked,” cried the mother.

“Listen, all of you!”

“My door!” said the mother. “Oh God! It's opening,
now
!”

There was a scream in the halls and the same scream on the phone.

The others stared at the phones in their hands where only their hearts beat.

“Mother!”

A door slammed upstairs.

The scream stopped suddenly.

“Mother!”

If only she hadn't yelled, thought Alice. If only she hadn't showed him the way.

“Madeline, Robert! Your guns. I'll count five and we'll
all
rush out! One, two, three—”

Robert groaned.

“Robert!”

He fell to the floor, the phone in his fist. His door was still locked. His heart stopped. The phone in his fist shouted, “Robert!” He lay still.

“He's at my door now!” said Madeline, high in the winter house.

“Fire through the door! Shoot!”

“He won't get
me,
he won't have his way with
me
!”

“Madeline, listen! Shoot through the door!”

“He's fumbling with the lock, he'll get in!”

“Madeline!”

One shot.

One shot and only one.

Alice stood in the library alone, staring at the cold phone in her hand. It was now completely silent.

Suddenly she saw that stranger in the dark, upstairs, outside a door, in the hall, scratching softly, smiling at the panel.

The shot!

The stranger in the dark peering down. And from under the locked door, slowly, a small stream of blood. Blood flowing quietly, very bright, in a tiny stream. All this, Alice saw. All this she knew, hearing a dark movement in the upstairs hall as someone moved from room to room, trying doors and finding silence.

“Madeline,” she said to the phone, numbly. “Robert!” She called their names, uselessly. “Mother!” She shut her eyes. “Why didn't you
listen
? If we had
all
of us at the very
first
—run out—”

Silence.

Snow fell in silent whirls and cornucopias, heaped itself in lavish quietness upon the lawn. She was now alone.

Stumbling to the window, she unlocked it, forced it up, unhooked the storm window beyond, pushed it out. Then she straddled, half in the silent warm world of the house, half out into the snowing night. She sat a long moment, gazing at the locked library door. The brass knob twisted once.

Fascinated, she watched it turn. Like a bright eye it fixed her.

She almost wanted to walk over, undo the latch, and with a bow, beckon in the night, the shape of terror, so as to know the face of such a one who, with hardly a knock, had razed an island fort. She found the gun in her hand, raised it, pointed it at the door, shivering.

The brass knob turned clockwise, counterclockwise. Darkness stood in darkness beyond, blowing. Clockwise, counterclockwise. With an unseen smile above.

Eyes shut she fired three times!

When she opened her eyes she saw that her shots had gone wide. One into the wall, another at the bottom of the door, a third at the top. She stared a moment at her coward's hand, and flung the gun away.

The doorknob turned this way, that. It was the last thing she saw. The bright doorknob shining like an eye.

Leaning out, she fell into the snow.

 

R
ETURNING WITH THE POLICE
hours later, she saw her footsteps in the snow, running away from silence.

She and the sheriff and his men stood under the empty trees, gazing at the house.

It seemed warm and comfortable, once again brightly lighted, a world of radiance and cheer in a bleak landscape. The front door stood wide to the blowing snows.

“Jesus,” said the sheriff. “He must have just opened up the front door and strolled
out,
damn, not caring
who
saw! Christ, what
nerve
!”

Alice moved. A thousand white moths flicked her eyes. She blinked and her eyes fixed in a stare. Then slowly, softly, her throat fluttered.

She began a laugh that ended with a muffled sobbing.

“Look!” she cried. “Oh,
look
!”

They looked, and then saw the second path of footprints which came neatly down the front porch stairs into the white soft velvet snow. Evenly spaced, with a certain serenity, these footprints could be seen where they marched off across the front yard, confident and deep, vanishing away into the cold night and snowing town.

“
His
footsteps.” Alice bent and put out her hand. She measured then tried to cover them with a thrust of her numb fingers. She cried out.

“
His
footsteps. Oh God, what a little man! Do you see the size of them, do you
see
! My God, what a
little
man!”

And even as she crouched there, on hands and knees, sobbing, the wind and the winter and the night did her a gentle kindness. Even as she watched, the snow fell into and around and over the footprints, smoothing and filling and erasing them until at last, with no trace, with no memory of their smallness, they were gone.

Then, and only then, did she stop crying.

I
T WAS THE CRYING LATE AT NIGHT
, perhaps, the hysteria, and then the sobbing violently, and after it had passed away into a sighing, I could hear the husband's voice through the wall. “There, there,” he would say, “there, there.”

I would lie upon my back in my night bed and listen and wonder, and the calendar on my wall said August 2002. And the man and his wife, young, both about thirty, and fresh-looking, with light hair and blue eyes, but lines around their mouths, had just moved into the rooming house where I took my meals and worked as a janitor in the downtown library.

Every night and every night it would be the same thing, the wife crying, and the husband quieting her with his soft voice beyond my wall. I would strain to hear what started it, but I could never tell. It wasn't anything he said, I was positive of this, or anything he did. I was almost certain, in fact, that it started all by itself, late at night, about two o'clock. She would wake up, I theorized, and I would hear that first terrorized shriek and then the long crying. It made me sad. As old as I am, I hate to hear a woman cry.

I remember the first night they came here, a month ago, an August evening here in this town deep in Illinois, all the houses dark and everyone on the porches licking ice-cream bars. I remember walking through the kitchen downstairs and standing in the old smells of cooking and hearing but not seeing the dog lapping water from the pan under the stove, a nocturnal sound, like water in a cave. And I walked on through to the parlor and in the dark, with his face devilish pink from exertion, Mr. Fiske, the landlord, was fretting over the air conditioner, which, damned thing, refused to work. Finally in the hot night he wandered outside onto the mosquito porch—it was made for mosquitoes only, Mr. Fiske averred, but went there anyway.

I went out onto the porch and sat down and unwrapped a cigar to fire away my own special mosquitoes, and there were Grandma Fiske and Alice Fiske and Henry Fiske and Joseph Fiske and Bill Fiske and six other boarders and roomers, all unwrapping Eskimo pies.

It was then that the man and his wife, as suddenly as if they had sprung up out of the wet dark grass, appeared at the bottom of the steps, looking up at us like the spectators in a summer night circus. They had no luggage. I always remembered that. They had no luggage. And their clothes did not seem to fit them.

“Is there a place for food and sleep?” said the man, in a halting voice.

Everyone was startled. Perhaps I was the one who saw them first, then Mrs. Fiske smiled and got out of her wicker chair and came forward. “Yes, we have rooms.”

“How much is the money?” asked the man in the broiling dark.

“Twenty dollars a day, with meals.”

They did not seem to understand. They looked at each other.

“Twenty dollars,” said Grandma.

“We'll move into here,” said the man.

“Don't you want to look first?” asked Mrs. Fiske.

They came up the steps, looking back, as if someone was following them.

That was the first night of the crying.

 

B
REAKFAST WAS SERVED EVERY MORNING
at seven-thirty, large, toppling stacks of pancakes, huge jugs of syrup, islands of butter, toast, many pots of coffee, and cereal if you wished. I was working on my cereal when the new couple came down the stairs, slowly. They did not come into the dining room immediately, but I had a sense they were just looking at everything. Since Mrs. Fiske was busy I went in to fetch them, and there they were, the man and wife, just looking out the front window, looking and looking at the green grass and the big elm trees and the blue sky. Almost as if they had never seen them before.

“Good morning,” I said.

They ran their fingers over antimacassars or through the bead-curtain-rain that hung in the dining room doorway. Once I thought I saw them both smile very broadly at some secret thing. I asked them their name. At first they puzzled over this but then said,