Cat in Glass (13 page)

These thoughts lead to others, about the man in my dream. I know where the words of the nightmare response came from now. I can almost relive the incident, moment by moment. It is a foggy day on the orphanage playground. I
am six years old. I see a man on the other side of the chain-link fence. He is hunched into a big, dark coat. He has a lovely, wild beard and a fisherman’s cap with a bill on it. I wander toward him, fascinated. He looks so flat and unreal in the fog. He calls my name. His breath is strong and sour. His voice is strange—husky and broken and wet. He is crying. He whispers the words. “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind!” Then he half runs, half stumbles, away into the mist.

Now the dream has brought to mind other forgotten incidents, other times when I have noticed a strange man in a dark coat and a fisherman’s cap. Six, seven, a dozen times perhaps. Interspersed throughout my life. The same old seaman watching me, almost always from a distance.

When I wake up the next morning, Fairfax has already slipped away. I hear her practicing the cello in her room down the hall, making a lot of mistakes. She replays the same passages again and again, loudly and impatiently. The day is clear and still, and the sun pours through my window while I pick up rumpled papers, rehang pictures, and replace my battered belongings in their usual cluttered order. There is no permanent damage. Everything looks just as it did before—perhaps a little less dusty.

At breakfast, I dutifully chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and assure everyone that everything is all right. Roddy embarks on a detailed story about the big storm of ’58, which uprooted trees, snapped power lines, and left half the houses on Loma de Viento without roofs. Not number
713, he assures us, smiling and stabbing at the yolk of his fried egg. There’s not another house in Las Piedras as well built as number 713.

That afternoon, we gather for tea in Roddy’s study, my favorite of all the rooms. Its walls look as if they are made of books. A single leaded-glass window and a stone fireplace peek out from among the gold titles and leather bindings. A threadbare Oriental carpet, mostly red, covers the floor. We mill about among the overstuffed chairs, sipping Earl Grey and Lapsang Souchong. Roddy munches gingersnaps and lectures Fairfax on the origins of her name. Nobody says anything about the wind.

“Such a happy quirk of fate,” he says. “The name Fairfax comes from the Old English
fyrfeax
, meaning ‘fire-haired.”’

A little smile drifts across her face, for the first time today. Fate, of course, had nothing to do with her name, not in the usual way, at least. At Our Lady of the Harbor, Sister Jude, the mother superior, had the duty of naming foundlings. When she was not at prayers or locked away in her office, she spent her time poring over copies of
Beowulf
or the tales of Alfred the king. At vespers, we used to whisper jokes about her. “Sister Jude speaks Old English like a native. Pass it on.” “Grendel is Sister Jude’s boyfriend. Pass it on.”

Roddy turns to me with animation. “You’ve an interesting name, too,” he says.

“What—Thorpe?” I don’t know anything about my surname except that Sister Jude chose it, probably on one of her less energetic days. I have always imagined her closing her eyes
and pointing, by accident, to the name Thorpe in an open phone book.

“Well … Thorpe’s interesting, but only vaguely. Comes from
thearf
, meaning ‘need’ or ‘distress.”’

How appropriate for an infant found in the dark on an orphanage stair, with nothing between her skin and the fog but a sailor’s tattered peacoat. Maybe I have sold Sister Jude short all these years.

“No, I was thinking more along the lines of Electra,” says Roddy. “Now there’s a truly fascinating name, don’t you agree? I would guess it figures somehow in your family history.”

I take a long swallow of hot tea. It seems to go down my throat in an irregular lump. The Desmonds don’t know yet about my background or Fairfax’s. I wish I could tell Roddy that I am named after my maternal grandmother or a special friend of the family. But the truth is I am only called Electra because that is the name the nuns found scribbled on a bit of soiled canvas in the pocket of my coat-blanket.

“There’s not much of a history in my family,” I reply, hoping Roddy will become discouraged and move on to some other subject.

But his eyes are bright, and he will not swerve. “Outside the obvious places, the myths and Freud’s books and such, I’ve only come across the name once before. Quite a story. There was an old ship, the
Electra
, used to sail up and down the coast around San Francisco. She was an antique—a barkentine, built to carry cargo, I suppose, but they’d redone her for passengers. Sort of a tourist attraction. She was a lovely sight
heading through the Golden Gate. Quite pretty. Doesn’t matter if she was old. A lot of old things are pretty.” He winks at Lavinia.

Suddenly, the tea is swirling around inside me. It’s too hot in the study. I glance toward the window. Maybe I can open it.

Roddy puffs at his pipe. Clouds of sweet-smelling smoke billow in the sunlight. “Quite an amazing story. She got caught in a terrible storm out near the Farallons and actually went to the bottom. November it was. Must be twenty years ago. Let’s see. I believe it was the year Sartre declined the Nobel.” He studies the ceiling as he works a mental sum. “So it’s actually twenty-one years ago now.”

He shakes his head. “They should never have had a ship like that out so late in the season. That’s what everybody said. Could have been a real disaster, but against all odds, against
incredible
odds, I might even say, the captain got the passengers and crew into lifeboats and saved them all. All but one, that is. A newborn baby, who was lost in the panic somehow. Quite a heroic story. You can imagine what a field day the newspapers had.”

A ship with my name, sunk the month I was born, the only fatality a newborn baby. Just a string of coincidences. That’s all. A string of coincidences. I repeat the words, but they are empty.

I don’t feel very well. My cup slips from my hand. I hear it break as it hits the edge of the table, a distant sound, like the tinkle of wind chimes.

I wobble across the room and unlatch the window. Before I can even push it open, a brutal gust of wind tears it from my hands and flings it outward. The window smashes against the rock wall of the house. Terror roars down my spine in an icy wave.

The carpet has turned into a roiling ocean. I see the ship, masts splintered, sails hanging in rags, wind driving the rain in horizontal sheets. Rain. The air seems full of it. From this wall of black water, Sister Jude emerges, holding out something rectangular and white. But the wind steals my breath, whirls me around like a leaf, and whatever it is she offers me, I can’t seem to reach it.

“The window’s broken!” Fairfax cries.

Dimly I sense that someone has a strong grip on my arm. I think it is Tony. Or is it the wind? Or is it both of them?

Then the world degenerates into noise. The wind howls.
A bargain is a bargain! Part and parcel
! Beneath that, there is an undercurrent of thuds and crashes, paper tearing and fluttering, the further shattering of glass, and Fairfax screaming my name over and over again.

Then the dream closes in around me, and nothing else seems real.

It’s a very long time before I can get the order of the words right. “My days shuttle past, windy life without hope, O remember I am a weaver …” Thousands of possibilities, none of them right, till finally one concatenation slips into the darkness like a key into a lock, and I wake up, gasping.

I am lying on my bed, a heavy wool blanket thrown over me. Fairfax dozes on the window seat, her head nodding forward. Tony sits beside me, reading a thick green book,
Paranormal Psychological Phenomena
. It has library reference numbers printed on the spine. There’s a purplish bruise beneath one of his eyes and a Band-Aid stuck in his hair.

“What happened to you?” I say.

He looks up, startled at first; then his dimples appear and his cheeks turn red. “Oh nothing,” he says. “Hey, Fairfax. She’s awake.”

Fairfax snaps upright, her eyes full of sleepy confusion. Through the window behind her, I can see that it’s dark outside. I hear the distant braying of the foghorn on Las Piedras Point. The house has a peculiar, muffled feeling about it, as if it’s wrapped in cotton.

“How long have I been asleep?” I ask.

“Hours,” says Fairfax. “Do you remember what happened?”

“No. It was noisy. I opened the window. I’ve been dreaming, haven’t I?”

“It was more than a dream,” says Tony. “The library’s a shambles. Roddy and Lavinia are still downstairs putting books away and sweeping up glass.”

I imagine Lavinia’s china teacups pounded to shards, the beautiful leather books lying bent and torn on the Oriental carpet, and kindly, whimsical old Roddy picking each one up and dusting it off like an injured child. What have they done to deserve this?

I sit up and test my feet against the floor. I feel as if I’ve been beaten with a board. “I’m going to the orphanage,” I say. “I’ve got to talk to Sister Jude.” But when I try to stand up, my knees buckle and I fall back onto the bed.

“Take it easy,” says Tony. “Here. You’ve been tossing and turning so much your pillow’s like a rock. Let me fluff it up for you.” He bats at the pillow clumsily, his worried gaze never leaving my face. “Fairfax told me all about this orphanage of yours. One thing’s for sure. It’s too far to go in the fog.”

Fairfax rises abruptly, hands clenched, thumbs inside her fists. “Electra, there’s a professor in the psychology department who’s interested in problems like yours. I think we should go see him. The orphanage can wait till tomorrow.”

I take a long breath. I remember how we used to argue about the difference between that which is incomprehensible and that which is impossible. I could never make her believe in the square roots of negative numbers, or in infinities, or even in the empty set. “Even nothing is something,” she would say. Perhaps the notion of wind as a conscious entity is just as difficult.

“I don’t need a psychologist, Fairfax. I need to see Sister Jude.”

“How the hell do you know?” She is trembling, and the veins in her neck stand out. “Do you realize that Tony almost got killed this afternoon shielding you from flying glass and books? And here you are, blabbering about going to see some half-witted nun who’s so far away from the real world
that she probably doesn’t even care what year it is. You know, there are other people’s lives in danger here! It’s not just you anymore.” She almost screams the last sentence.

By the time she finishes, I am trembling, too, and working my fists around inside my pockets to keep from lashing out at her.

Tony touches my arm. “Look, Electra. I don’t know anything about parapsychology.” He gestures toward the thick green book with the library numbers. “I’m not sure I even believe in it. But I am a scholar. And I do know that when you’ve got a specific problem, the best way to start on a solution is to track down every lead you can find—even the wildest. Maybe Fairfax is right. Maybe this guy can help you figure out what’s going on. How will you ever know if you don’t go see him?”

Track down every lead, even the wildest
. I almost smile at the irony of Tony’s words. I look out the window at the gray wall of fog. Somewhere beyond it, beating the waves into foam, whistling among the offshore rocks, the wind is waiting for me. The marrow of my bones is cold with eerie certainty that the wind means to kill anyone who tries to keep it from getting what it wants. There is no time left for pride.

I sit up very straight. “Take me to the orphanage. Just take me up there, and I promise I’ll go see the psychologist tomorrow.”

Fairfax sticks her jaw out. “What can anybody at Our Lady of the Harbor possibly do that a psychologist can’t do better?”

“They can tell me about my past.”

Fairfax swallows, and is silent.

Roddy and Lavinia watch from the porch as we slide into the front seat of Tony’s car. “Won’t you reconsider? It’s a terrible night for driving,” says Lavinia.

Roddy rubs her gently on the back and waves to us. “Be very careful,” he says.

Tony calls out across the misty yard, “Don’t worry. We’ll be home before you know it.” Then he turns the key in the ignition.

“Sorry,” he says, as the engine rumbles to life. “The top has been stuck in the down position ever since I bought it. I haven’t had time to fix it yet.” He flicks the heater switch to high.

It’s not far to San Francisco. On a clear day, it takes only thirty or forty minutes to get there. But tonight is different. The fog is so thick it even diffuses the dashboard lights. For all I can tell, we are sitting in a parked car with a fan blowing on our faces. Tony assures me we are moving at a steady twenty miles per hour. I don’t know whether to curse the fog for slowing us down or to pray that it won’t disappear. It is an omen. A signal. As long as it surrounds us, I know the wind is far away.

It is almost ten-thirty when we reach Our Lady of the Harbor. Adobe walls loom out of the night, full of dark windows. The hour of the compline is long past, but the Little Sisters of Saint Camillus never turn away visitors in need.
There is always someone on duty. Tony, Fairfax, and I huddle before the massive door and ring the night bell.

We wait a moment, listening for footsteps, hearing only the creak of moorings on the nearby wharf. I wonder how many nights, as a child, I lay in my bed and listened to this very sound.

It seems hours before a voice comes from behind the tiny, barred door-window. “Who rings our bell?”

“Electra Thorpe, Mary Fairfax, and a friend,” I say.

“Electra? Mary Fairfax?” Bolts are shot back, the door thrown open, and there stands Sister Michael. A smile creeps across her pale, abstracted face. We have probably pulled her from some private prayer. She hugs us and draws us through the vestibule toward the library. “You look so cold, poor dears. But how wonderful to see you! Come, come. I have a fire lit. I was just reading Saint Augustine. Are you familiar with him?”