Centuries of June (12 page)

Something to eat, of course. The old man was, at that moment, upstairs with Dolly and Jane doing who knows what. But I remembered: he was hungry and wanted his dinner. The cobwebs cleared, I paused at the front door, the kitchen to my left, and to my right the living room sat like a tomb. The cat cried out softly, so I poked my head around the corner to see him atop the television, the end of his tail a perfect circle around the LED clock. With a kiss I beckoned him, and he came straightaway, arching his back and rubbing against me in a comforting manner. I picked him up and walked to the kitchen.

The second line came to me:
To fetch her poor dog a bone
. I switched on the light and the room radiated in stark clarity. Someone had come in during the middle of the night, in the interim between this and my previous visit, and had cleaned the joint, a thorough scrubbing, the countertops glistening, the stovetop sparkling, and every appliance, breadbasket, knife rack, and all else neat and ordered, giving the kitchen an artificial quality as if a model one or a prop set for the stage or a photo
shoot. Behind the facade of cupboards and cabinets, all was bare, not one box, bag, or can of food, not so much as a spice jar or box of baking soda. The refrigerator, too, had been emptied and sanitized. “Sorry, puss,” I told him.
“When she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so her poor doggie had none.”

The cat mewed hungrily. I scooped him in my arms and headed for the basement where I kept an additional store, canned goods, coffee, tea, and a freezer filled with food that did not normally fit in the pantry or the cupboards. Under the weak light of a hanging bulb, the room was dim but reassuringly recognizable: the washer and dryer, the stack of old design and architectural textbooks and other mementos of my former life, and on the table next to my toolbox and odd pieces of wood sat the surplus foodstuff. I spied a can of tuna and pocketed it for the cat. A dizzying array of canned soups and fruits and vegetables rose in a pyramid. “What did the old man want?” I asked myself. “Not turtle soup, but something else …”

“Slumgullion,” said the cat.

Without hesitation, I began to scan the labels. “Never heard of slumgullion—” And then it occurred to me that the cat should not have spoken. He crouched among the pears and beans in the normal, catlike manner, his ears pricked as if listening. His tail twitched under my scrutiny. “What did you just say?”

A low, mocking purr issued from deep inside him like the gears and cogs of a clock. I redoubled my search for slumgullion, but it obviously was not there, so taking a can at random, I held it up for his consideration, but the cat looked first at it and then at me with a blank and incurious stare, and I began to feel a little foolish for thinking that cats could read. With a flick of the wrist, I turned it round to look at the label: cream of mushroom.

“Ick,” said the cat. “Try the mulligatawny.” His lips—do cats have lips?—did not move as the syllables exited, and he seemed to
be communicating telepathically in a high feline voice that sounded vaguely Australian. Clearly it was the cat talking and not merely the echo of my imagination.

“How did you do that?”

Once again, he adopted a passive mood, and his expression remained sphinxlike. I found a family-sized can of Trader Joe’s Mulligatawny Soup and then went to the freezer for a package of heat-’n’-serve naan to accompany it, and with a nod to Harpo, I went back upstairs to the kitchen to heat the meal. A few minutes into the preparation, the cat followed me into the room, creeping underfoot in expectation. The soup bubbled in the pot and the oven timer ticked off the minutes till the bread was hot. “What is it, boy? Cat got your tongue?” The bell dinged, and I fished out the tuna in the pocket of my robe. I opened the tin and plopped the whole mess into a dish and set it on the floor for him. Loading three bowls and three spoons on a tray, along with the pot of soup and a basket of bread, I swept it up on my hand and shoulder like a waiter to bring dinner to my guests.

“Thanks for your help,” I called out over my shoulder.

“Thanks for the tunafish, mate,” Harpo said.

Breathless and stiff from the heavy load, I arrived at the bathroom to find the threesome waiting patiently. They appeared just as I had left them, the old man bundled into the terrycloth robe, and Dolly and Jane in their nightgowns, composed and unruffled, as if they had merely taken a brief stroll in my absence. Dolly and my father still had the third eye drawn on their eyelids, and Jane had bound her wild braids into a single coil held in place by another rope of her hair. Her long elegant neck lay bare. Tattooed along the left side was a small Chinese dragon, its fanged mouth open beneath her ear as if to strike. Drawn to the scent of chicken and curry, the three crowded around and triggered for me a wee bit of claustrophobia. No logical place existed for me to lay down my burden, so I covered the sink
with the tray and lifted the lid to the pot of soup. “I hope you all like mulligatawny.”

“Excellent,” the old man said.

I asked, “Would you not be more comfortable dining in the dining room? Perhaps the kitchen, which is now spotlessly clean?”

Dolly ladled a heaping bowl while Jane attacked the naan, tearing a piece in half and shoving the warm bread into her mouth. With the wiggle of a crooked finger, the old man bade me come closer. We huddled under the open window. “A word, bucko, if you don’t mind. It’s not me that wants to eat in the bathroom, but the girls. They’re allergic to cats. If I’m not mistaken, there’s one of them beasts on the premises.”

“Harpo? How did you know?”

“Have you ever heard of an aura, mac? Every living thing has a wave of energy they carry with them. As much a living part of you as your skin or your hair. Or in the case of a cat, its fur. And as you move through the world, you shed bits and pieces—”

“Like dandruff? Or cat dander? Many people are allergic to cat dander.”

“More like the scent of a woman who just left the room, or the memory of a person brought back upon hearing some old love song. The sound of mandolins, or Proust’s madeleines, or the taste of boyhood in a peach ice cream cone. The ineffable essence. The cat’s been here.”

“Well, he doesn’t shed.”

“The aura you leave behind is not the same thing as forensic evidence.”

The discussion of the cat reminded me of our conversation in the basement, and the old man seemed a likely source for explanation. “But the cat can talk,” I said. “He recommended the mulligatawny. What do you think of that?”

The old man peeled back the window curtain and looked intently at the black night. “I think there’s something wrong in your head.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you have said all night.” In fact, the knock on my nut could explain a great many of the events of that early morning as an elaborate sequence of hallucinations, from the man with feathers in his mouth to the talking cat to the mystery of 4:52. I stole another peek at Dolly and Jane, both barefoot in their diaphanous nightgowns, seated face-to-face in the empty bathtub, eating curry soup. The dragon on Jane’s neck had changed positions, so that now the head pointed to her bosom and the tail wound round her ear. The women appeared real enough. And the man with his back to me, who peered out into the fathomless night, he seemed quite solid. I tapped him on the shoulder to confirm my suspicions, but I may have hit bone for he felt hard as stone and fixed as a statue. When he finally acknowledged my persistence, he spoke as if suddenly remembering a broken-off conversation.

“So you were telling me about this house.”

I was not following his train of thought and was still at the station when he was miles down the track, but I sputtered and started. “Well, I know it’s not quite the house you’d expect of an architect.”

From the bathtub, Dolly chimed in, “I had no idea you were an architect.”

“Would we know,” Jane added at once, “any of your designs? A house of cards, perhaps?”

The sad truth was that nothing I had planned had ever been built. “I guess I should say I work in an architectural firm, but I’m kind of a finishing man, doing the small details of big plans. Home offices, day care playrooms. I once did a prototype of the office of the future …”

Dolly and Jane giggled like schoolgirls. “Frank Lloyd Wrong,” Jane muttered to her friend.

“We bought this house when the market started going up, an
investment really. My brother and I—” My own sentence stopped me. For the life of me I could not place my brother, not his face nor his name nor anything about him, though he must exist, for how else could I have afforded to buy this house? Brushing the matter aside, I continued. “There’s nine rooms in all, your standard center hall colonial, built around 1922. The master bedroom and the nursery, which as you know, I converted into a study. I put in that archway myself. And then the bedroom upstairs in the front, which was my brother’s—” What had become of my brother? Where had he gone, like my mother, like my father? Like the woman I love? “And downstairs, the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Then there’s the basement and the attic, not a room proper, but nine spaces in any case. If you count the bathroom we’re in, which at the moment seems to be the heart of it all. Cozy, not much, but home—”

The old man cleared his throat and set down his empty bowl, the spoon clattering against the sides. “Very trenchant, but I was referring to the one distinctive architectural detail of the place, the unusual feature you earlier mentioned.”

Like a four-year-old, Dolly leapt to stand and raised her arm, waving her hand like a butterfly. “I know, I know,” she said. “Tell us about the singing windows. You said you came home last night and heard singing coming from the windows.”

“The bicycles heaped on the lawn,” the old man said, “like an orgy of chrome and rubber. And the house with singing windows. Verdi, I believe you said.”

The beginning of the story seemed so long ago and longer still the events it narrates, so that I had trouble, momentarily, remembering where I had left off. “Not the house itself, but a person inside the house singing that could be heard through the windows. And not Verdi, but the ‘Laughing Song’ from
Die Fledermaus
, to the best of my recollection.”

“You’re absolutely sure it was the Strauss?” Dolly asked.

The old man simply ignored my uncertainty. He gaped at the mirror over my shoulder and flicked with his fingertip at a spot on his forehead as if trying to remove some fleck on his skin which he noticed in the reflection. Facing him, I saw nothing but a deeply furrowed brow, free of all dirt or blemish.

“There was a piano playing,” I said. “And a woman singing that very distinct song—‘Mein Herr Marquis’—with the laughing chorus, and she rode the register with such delightful inflection that it was, well, infectious, and I found myself laughing, too, as I came to the door, despite the fact that the presence of someone inside the house was both puzzling and disconcerting. I followed the melody up the stairs and into my brother’s room. My former brother’s room …”

Jane offered her help. “Your brother’s former room?”

“That one,” I answered. “Opening the door, I was taken aback by the sight of a recital going on in that space. A woman, the mezzo, stood next to the piano, her hands folded under her breast as she sang, and another woman played the piano, her back to me and the audience, which itself was composed of a number of other women seated in two rows of chairs arranged in a semicircle. A span of a few seconds intervened between the moment I entered and when everyone noticed me and stopped what they were doing. Stuck in the threshold, I was simply stunned. It seemed like they were putting on a show for my benefit. Elaborate stagecraft, fancy costumes, and the striking beauty of every woman onstage.”

“Sir, you are too kind,” said Jane.

Dolly nudged her in the ribs and whispered an aside. “He was always the flattering sort of man. Silver-tongued fox.”

Frantic at the imaginary spot on his forehead, the old man rubbed his skin with the ball of his fist. “Pardon my interruption, but is there something in your mirror?” He put his hand on my shoulder and spun me around to face our reflection. Between our images in the glass, a
small brown spot about the size of a half-dollar swelled to the size of a coffee cup. I touched the mirror to determine whether some blotch spread sandwiched in the layers, but the object existed somewhere behind the surface, and its diameter continued to increase.

“What is that?” I asked. “It seems to be getting bigger and bigger.”

He grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the door. “May I suggest, in that case, we get the hell out of the way.”

All at once the looking glass exploded, shards and slivers raining upon impact as a stick launched into the room. A thick wooden pole, deadly as a missile, protruded from the medicine cabinet and hung perpendicular to the floor. The far end of the shaft, broad and bristled, was lodged in the space where the mirror once had been.

“Looks like an old broom,” I said and grasped it with both hands, ready to pull.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the old man.

But curiosity got the better of me, and with a tug I freed what turned out to be an old handmade broom, its sweeping end composed of rough bristles hewn from rushes, and the handle gnarled and weatherworn, with two greasy black stains marking its pockmarked top.

Wrapping her arms around her chest, Dolly said, “Now he’s gone and done it.”

Jane just pointed back to the mirror. Where the hole had been, a new layer of glass now shimmered darkly. A wild human cry emanated from the distance, some far-off place inside the reflection. A figure, small as a doll, tumbled in the air, arms and legs flailing, bright auburn hair twirling madly, red dress billowing as she rolled end over end. Steadily growing larger as she approached, the woman screamed as she burst through the surface, sending another shower of glass upon us all, and landing herself in a heap underneath the window.