Children Are Bored on Sunday Page 9

  When they had both finished and the doctor had put away the food, he settled once more in the rocking chair with the brandy decanter at his elbow. He opened the journal that had come that day and began methodically with the first article, one on the use of sulfa drugs in the treatment of sinusitis. He had read only a few sentences when Milenka leaped to his lap. Dr. Pakheiser ran his fingers under the cat’s jaw and around the ears, laid his whole hand on the little gray belly to feel the vibration and read on, at last in repose now that his house was complete. But there was an uneasiness stirring at the back of his mind and although he concentrated and extracted the full meaning from all he read that night, he observed when he rose at twelve to put Milenka out that he had drunk three times as much brandy as was his custom and had made a great inroad into the package of Egyptian Prettiests which he never smoked after supper.

  That night he had a strange dream. He dreamed of D-day. He and little Greta Jost had come to wish Mr. Horvath good luck and they had set out to find rooms. The hotels were crowded, for the holiday throngs were tremendous. They sauntered up the boardwalk, admiring the bright tailored shingle where fashionable people were gathered for the start of the regatta. They entered a hotel which was quite deserted save for a man sitting alone on a little mezzanine at one end of the lobby. He sat at a round amethyst-colored glass table, drinking a very pink cocktail, and as they approached, he stood up smiling and cordially extending his hand. They recognized the President and they were gratified when he called them both by name. His address was old-fashioned: he said “Miss Greta” and “Mr. Alfred.” Linking arms, the three of them went out. The President said that while he wished the invasion to be as leisurely as possible, it would be folly, would it not, to give the signal too late in the day? Did not his young friends agree that despite our great advances in electricity, there was something essentially better about sunlight? Never was there so civilized a man! In the pure, brilliant sky, exquisite airplanes circled and swooped like the loveliest of birds. There was such a profusion of scarlet! In the flags, in the hats of the spectators, on the wings of planes, in colossal bouquets in vases a mile high situated on the beach at intervals of fifteen yards. The yachts were all ready, freshly painted, brightly bannered for the race to Europe.

  Alfred and Greta were the first to land. As they walked up the ramp, he noticed the tiny Scotch plaid ribbons that bound her pigtails. Wandering, they could not find the Konditorei he had suggested although time and time again they set forth from the Heiliggeist cathedral and took the familiar street. Nor was it possible, as formerly, to see the ruined castle from the bridge, and Greta said, “Herr Pakheiser, I don’t believe this is Heidelberg. Now I am afraid and I want my mother. I think we have come to Heilbronn by mistake.” But Alfred pointed to the marking that clearly read, “Philosophen Weg,” and he soothed her, “Don’t be frightened, dearest.” They were speeding in a dirty express train through Freiburg, its towers and steeples flattened out like any corpse, its vineyards wasted with drought and disease. The Alps diminished as they neared them. No trees were left. The sun was small and red like an ember. Alfred, receiving a wicker-covered jug of wine from a weeping man who shared their compartment, was too touched and too embarrassed to begin a conversation, but at last he thought of something. “Sir,” he said solemnly, “sir, did you ever go fishing in the Sound for bass, using a caddis worm as bait?” The wine in the man’s throat gurgled like a death rattle as he looked out at the leveled mountains. “There was a short notice in some review or other,” he said, “outlined in black. Even so … even so…”

  In the limbo where he waited a moment before he wakened fully, he thought he was writing the opening paragraph of a children’s story in which a little boy lay on his stomach drinking water from a stream. Suddenly his eyes encountered two others, hooded, sparkling with some horrible intelligence. They belonged to a monstrous caddis worm which advanced through the water as he withdrew.

  He woke violently. He clasped his hands to his forehead and in the darkness softly moaned. “I must control myself. I must not perish here.”

  III

  Late in May, Milenka disappeared. Dr. Pakheiser was disturbed but not really anxious until the fourth night passed and he still dined alone. On the fifth morning he diffidently asked Mrs. Horvath if she had seen the cat, and he detected something doubtful, something covert in her reply. She was not arrogant and her eyes seemed unable to focus on his face. She said—uncomfortably, it seemed to him—“No, Doctor. I see him Sunday. My husband see him Sunday. He come back, don’t you worry.” Then she looked directly at him and smiled, “He know where his sardine is, I tell you.” The doctor was smoking and as he went to the table to drop a long ash into the tray there, his hand abruptly shook and the ashes fell to the carpet. He and the woman both briefly looked at them, dispersed fanwise on the green border. And he knew then that she was hiding something, for she did not reproach him for his clumsiness even though she had just finished using the carpet sweeper. He was so angry that he stumbled to the door and his rage so blinded him that he had to lean against the jamb a moment before he could see the steps. It was not, at this moment, that he was mourning the loss of Milenka; it was that he had sensed, despite her near-civility and his own timorousness, as killing a hatred between them as though they were two jungle beasts, determined to destroy one another. “If she has killed my cat,” he brooded as he drove through the gate, “then I…” but he could not finish the sentence. He could devise no penalty high enough for such wickedness, no penance sufficiently humiliating.

  For two weeks nothing passed between the manageress and her lodger. Nothing, that is, but glances boldly indignant on the doctor’s part, guilty on the woman’s. It seemed to him that the life of the rest of the house had ceased, that all was at an ominous standstill before a final battle to the death. And then, incredibly, the cat came back. When he first heard the mewing outside his door on the dot of seven, Dr. Pakheiser could not believe his ears. Not until the sound had been repeated two or three times did he open the door. His joy at the reunion was less than his shame for falsely accusing Mrs. Horvath and less than his bewilderment at her shifty-eyed embarrassment. Apparently Milenka had just wandered off somewhere as tom-cats do in the spring. He was thin and mangy and his coat was matted with cockleburs and beggar’s-lice. His purr had a bronchial rasp and the doctor made a note on his memorandum pad to bring home a worm pill the next night. Nor had he any appetite for the bit of herring which was all that the doctor had to offer him, and after less than half an hour, he asked to be let out. But this strangeness, under good care, would pass. That night the doctor slept well.

  “Good morning,” he cried heartily as he met Mrs. Horvath in the hall the following day. “Have you seen my friend, Mrs. Horvath? He came back for his sardine as you promised me.”

  The woman’s eyes opened from their sleepiness, her lips parted in disbelief, and she said, “Back? That cat back?” Dr. Pakheiser assured her that what he said was true and at that moment, to confirm him, Milenka leaped to the window sill from the veranda and sat there in profile, blinking his eyes. Mrs. Horvath stared, “I do not know,” she said. “It is like a dream.” The doctor surmised, then, that the cat had been put into a bag and taken into the country somewhere and been abandoned. It was scarcely believable that he could be so gross as to laugh triumphantly and almost to sob his words: “Yes, Mrs. Horvath, my dearest friend is restored to me!”

  She looked away from the window. “But, Doctor, I do not know. My son, he catch birds all while now. His school finish pretty soon. I think he don’t want that cat here.”

  “It is cruel to catch birds,” he said severely, no longer tyrannized over by her now that he had got his cat back. “And I want him here even if that boy doesn’t.” It gave him pleasure to say “that boy” just as she and her son spoke of “that cat.”

  “But, Doctor, the cat kill birds. My boy don’t kill them. He make them into good pet.”

  “It is the cat’s
nature to kill birds. But it is not the nature of man to take prisoners.”

  “No?” she said. The look of cunning returned to her face. “What we fight war for, then, Doctor?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Horvath, I am sure.” He was overpowered with disgust that he should be haggling with this obtuse woman over the life of a diseased cat, and that he should be confronted by so irrelevant a question which he could not answer and which, in spite of its fatuous context, made him feel that because he could only say he did not know, like an unprepared schoolboy, his mind was growing dull. And just as he was preparing to bid the manageress good morning and to hurry to his office to plunge himself into work, she threw out a remark more imbecilic than the first but one that utterly confounded him. She said, “My son protect birds from cats just like America protect Jews from Hitler.”

  For a moment, before he had collected himself, he read an awful symbolic wisdom into this absurdity. Unhampered by learning, in a country where she could not read the language and could barely speak it, where she could be influenced only by the most basic of national prejudices and loyalties, she was truly a natural enemy. Here was the perfect, the pure hatred; the real thing was in Mrs. Horvath’s simple heart. He was not so far gone yet as to think that she was bent on getting rid of the cat out of vengeance. Her reasons were more human than that; she did not like cats and she wanted to indulge her son. But at the same time, there was something so sure in her figure of speech that it was as if, from now on, she would implicitly believe it, would even repeat it in later conversations.

  In reply, Dr. Pakheiser only smiled. On his way out, he gave Milenka a pat on the head and said loudly, “I-yi-yi-yi, bad puss!” and walked jauntily round the house to his car, whistling. Whistling, as the phrase went, in the dark.

  All spring, Dr. Pakheiser trod on eggs. Each evening when he came home and parked his car in the back yard where Freddie was at work on his bird traps, his heart constricted with apprehension. This would be the night, he thought, when Milenka would not come. The boy, grinning even as he pounded in the nails, looked up with a dispassionate greeting. “Hi, Doc. This is for me to get me an oriole in, see? And that there one is for me to get me a purple grackle in. I lure ’em—I know how they whistle and I whistle and they think I’m a bird—and then they get in this little place here, see, and I pull a string and the door comes down and they can’t get out. And then I get ’em so tame they’ll eat right out of my hand.” Once or twice the doctor inquired about his school with the intention of keeping things running smoothly between them. He went to the nuns to whom he referred collectively as “Sister.” “Sister flunked me in Latin but she gave me B in Algebra and D plus in English.” But it bored him to talk about the contents of his days; he would break off suddenly and pointing to the blackbirds in the dead tree would say, “See them? I don’t want ’em but I could have ’em all if I did.” And the doctor would look up at the crowded branches, object of his dreamy contemplation every day. “They’re dumb birds,” Freddie would say as he threw a pebble into the tree and they all disbanded. “They don’t know where they’re at.” Dr. Pakheiser would reply, “I don’t think any birds at all know where they’re at.” They had come to this conventional rite through a mutual understanding: the doctor disliked birds, the boy disliked cats. Neither spoke of his aversion, but under their banter was the serious warning, “Your pet stays where it belongs, or else.”

  Milenka was soon prospering. His coat came in soft and shining; his purr cleared and his eyes lost the milkiness that had clouded them when he first came home. He was full grown now and, obliged to assume the responsibilities of a male animal, sometimes missed a meal and spent the time with a plump old tabby who howled for him on the stone wall. But good friend that Milenka was, if he failed to come one evening, he sneaked through the door early the next morning when someone went out to the day-shift. The doctor came to enjoy these morning visits even more than the evening ones. He would go back to bed after he had poured out the cream and lie there watching; when the cat had finished, he would jump to the bed, walk carefully up Dr. Pakheiser’s legs to the thigh and there establish himself. But there was one drawback to his coming in the daytime. Ironically, a pair of wrens had built a nest under the eave of the corner window and Milenka, hearing them rustle and chirp, would sit up, his whiskers twitching, his sleek little body poised for a leap. And whenever this happened, Dr. Pakheiser felt a thrill of disquiet, afraid the cat would commit a crime during the day while he was at his office and could not intercede for him.

  Just as Milenka thrived, so did Freddie’s successes multiply and by the first of June, the clumsy home-made cages in the garage were half full of orioles and robins and finches and flickers which, at feeding time, gave out a dissonant and reedy clamor. One Sunday afternoon, when school was over for him and the skies were full of birds, Freddie stalked a robin in full view of the doctor’s windows. He crept across the lawn on his hands and knees toward the large unmoving bird. The advance could either have been for the purpose of murder or for ministration to an injured wing. It was beautiful to watch. There was no sudden nervous jerking, no change of pace. When he was within two feet of the bird, his hands left the ground and his lips parted in his earnestness. His posture and his skill made the doctor think of a praying mantis, one of those miraculously ugly creatures which he had seen on the road under a tulip tree and had taken at first for withering seed pods. Now, a foot away, the hands parted. He was ready for the capture. Dr. Pakheiser found himself holding his breath and could not tell whether he wanted the bird to foil the boy or wished to see it taken. Directly under the certain hands, the prey was still unaware. Now they descended and gently took the bird. Freddie stroked its head tenderly with his forefinger and when the captive made a movement to escape, he drew it to his chest smiling rapturously. And the doctor might have warmed toward him, seeing the innocent happiness in his face, had he not bawled out, “Hey, Mom! Got me another one. Boy, oh, boy, am I good!”

  IV

  Its head high, its tail feathers trailing the ground, the great cock-pheasant moved with dignity out of the shadow of the apple tree into the light where all the glory of its habiliments shone like a sun-struck diamond. Dr. Pakheiser, who had been roused early by an urgent telephone call, paused in his dressing to watch the wonderful bird. He had never seen one before save in pictures which he had not altogether believed. The japanning of its plumage had been masterful: emerald blazed forth beside gold and gold beside scarlet. There was something about it so rich and unusual that he did not think of it as a bird at all but as a costly ornament for the patch of bright grass where now it stopped, surveying the terrain as if this were its own dominion. But the kingly creature was no wiser than its plebeian brothers, and it began to walk rapidly toward one of Freddie’s traps. The doctor immediately flung wide his window, unfastened the screen and leaned out, shouting and waving his arms to scare away the foolish bird. He disturbed the sleeping wrens in the eave and they flew wildly against the screen, then sailed off to the apple tree. But the pheasant was deaf to warnings and walked complacently toward his prison. In a frenzy, Dr. Pakheiser reached back to the bedside table and picked up his metal ashtray from Milan. He hurled it at the pheasant. It fell close to the quick feet and instantly the bird turned, running, this time, back over the grass through the shadow of the apple tree and disappeared in the tall weeds that grew about the abandoned boats. Freddie ran out of the cottage. The doctor fastened his screen and stepped back out of sight behind the drapery at the window, but he watched the boy whose face was contorted with fury and frustration. Tears began as he picked up the ashtray. For a second he stared at it as if he were not sure what to do with it and then, with a bawl, he flung it into the water which was at low tide and, cursing at the top of his voice, went indoors.

  Dr. Pakheiser finished dressing. He knew that he was not steady enough to shave, but he washed his face and hands slowly and thoroughly, using the nail brush with unaccustomed vigor. He li
ghted a cigarette and sat down, aware that his delay was selfish. But his patient seemed remote, the illness unimportant. It was not until the cigarette had burned down to nothing that he got up, found his hat and went out. He stole quietly down the stairs and round the house. There was no sign of life in the back yard. From within the cottage came the sound of Mrs. Horvath’s voice; she spoke loudly but in Hungarian and he understood nothing of what she said. He gained his car and he was safe. But he knew that the score was not yet settled, for as he drove away, he saw Freddie’s face at the window, the strange Mongolian nose spread out as it pressed against the pane. This, finally, would be the day of reckoning.

  When he came home at five that afternoon, Dr. Pakheiser found both Mrs. Horvath and Freddie in the large front bedroom downstairs. Someone had just moved out and they were making it ready for a new tenant. They were turning the mattress, but when they saw the doctor, they stopped, the great thing folded halfway over and held in their strong red hands.

  Mrs. Horvath said, “Good night, Doctor. I bring you ashtray tomorrow. You lose your blue one?” He had not anticipated so devious an attack and he was nonplused. Since all three of them knew well enough that the ashtray was lying in the mud, it was absurd to carry on her game, to say, for example, that he had taken it to the office. And so he replied ambiguously, “Oh, thank you. If you have an extra one, I will be glad to have it.” He started toward the stairs, but they had not finished with him yet.

  Mrs. Horvath said, “Was it a good day, Doctor?”

  “A busy day,” he said. “But, yes, a good one, I think.”

  The boy, his chin upon the mound of the mattress, fixed him with the fearless eye of the insulted child and slowly said, “It wasn’t a good day for me, Doctor. It was a bad day for me, wasn’t it, Mom?”