Ammie, Come Home (6 page)

She finished her cigarette and stood up, conscious of a cowardly disinclination to turn her back on the fireplace—a sentiment which she conquered at once. But she went up the stairs rather briskly, and she left the light on in the living room.

As she drifted off to sleep she found herself listening for a repetition of the call that had roused her. But she heard nothing more. Her room was in the front of the house, and the call seemed to come from the garden side, where Sara's room faced. Sammie certainly picked unsalubrious weather for prowling, she thought drowsily, and then—her last conscious thought before sleep claimed her—funny name for a cat….

WASHINGTONIANS TAKE A PERVERSE PRIDE IN THE PERVERSITY
of their weather, refusing to admit that it is, in this respect, like weather anywhere. Ruth had been a resident long enough to feel a sense of personal achievement when Sunday dawned fair and warm after a week of Alaskan cold. Sara had been out until all hours the night before, with the unavoidable Bruce, but she made her appearance at an early breakfast looking as dewy-eyed and rested as a baby. Ruth thought, “Ah, youth,” but did not say it, and waved the girl off to a picnic at Great Falls without mentioning that it was not really quite warm enough for shorts. If she had legs like that, she told herself, she would display them too. And the shorts
weren't much shorter, in fact, than the skirts the girls were wearing.

Before indulging in a second cup of coffee she tidied up the kitchen, deriving housewifely satisfaction from the look of shining steel and gleaming porcelain. Then she settled down with
The New York Times.

The kitchen had been built at the tail end of the house, as kitchens of old houses were in that semitropical climate, so that cooking heat and odors would not permeate the rest of the house. The breakfast bay, where Ruth was sitting, had been added in a later century so that the inhabitants could enjoy the view of the walled garden, with its backdrop of firs and magnolias. They glowed greenly in the morning sunlight, and the birds, enjoying the warmth, were out in full voice.

Ruth struggled nobly with the reports of disaster—national, personal, and international—for half an hour, and then threw the paper aside as a particularly penetrating avian shriek reached her ears. Probably just a jay complaining about some private tribulation or fancied affront…. But perhaps a passing cat was bothering the birds. She really ought to go out and see.

It took only minutes to change her robe for slacks and sweater, and to run a comb through her short fair curls. When she got outside she realized that Sara was right; it really was too warm for wool clothing. The sun fell like soft intangible fingers on her hands and face. Standing in the middle of the flagged terrace, she threw out her arms and lifted her face in a sudden transport of sheer well-being. It was a wonderful day on which to be alive.

The garden was large for a city house, but then that was one of the features of Georgetown that its inhabitants prized most highly. The house had been built at the very edge of the long narrow lot, so that there was no front yard at all, only an areaway. All the land was in back, and it was fenced high on three sides. Georgetowners lacked the jovial conviviality of suburbanites; they liked their privacy, and did not take offense at others' enjoying theirs. Ruth scarcely knew her neighbors, and there were no gates or doors connecting the yards.

The boards of the fence needed painting, but their ugliness was masked by shrubs and bushes. All but the box and holly were bare now; the lilac and forsythia had lost most of their leaves in the windstorm of the past week, and the ones remaining were sere and yellowing. But Ruth eyed their straggling contours fondly. She had moved into the house the preceding spring, and one memory that would be imprinted forever on her brain was the sight of the garden when she first saw it, with the great heaps of forsythia like sprawling yellow fountains, sending out sprays so bright as to seem luminous. Cousin Hattie had not been able to afford a full-time gardener in her last years, and her part-time boy had spent his efforts on the grass and the roses and let the gnarled old lilacs and other bushes grow as nature decreed. The results had been beautiful.

After the forsythia faded, then came the dogwood—pale rose and white stars against the olive green of the firs—and the gorgeous flaming masses of the azaleas, rose-pink fuschia and salmon, and white like a spotless drift of snow. There had been lily of the valley in the moist shadows of the pines, and violets thrust green fingers into every possible corner, penetrating the chinks in the brickwork of the patio invading the rose beds. The lilac, perfuming the whole outdoors, and spirea, and flowering quince….

Ruth had never been much of a nature lover; she had not consciously wanted a garden while she lived in the apartment on Massachusetts Avenue. She had not known how much she missed one until she walked through the back door of Aunt Hattie's house and saw the forsythia blaze out like little fallen suns.

She stooped to pick up some bits of scrap paper, blown in from the street, and then decided to get her gloves and tools and go at the garden. It was too splendid a day to stay indoors.

Trailing the rake, she went back to see how the roses had withstood the wind. They usually bloomed beautifully well into November, so she had not cut them back; the cold spell had taken her by surprise. On the first blustery night she and Sara had dragged in the wrought-iron table and chairs which stood in warm weather under the big oak in the center of the yard. Its spreading branches had been like sunset during October. Now most of the crimson leaves were on the ground under the tree. That would be the next job, after she had checked the roses.

They were in a sheltered spot, and had not suffered so badly as she feared. Colored confetti flakes of petals spattered the ground—pink and white and crimson so dark it was almost black—but several buds still lifted brave heads, and Ruth decided to leave them just in case the warm weather held. She knew she would never make a gardener; it gave her a physical pang to cut the roses back, as if she were amputating legs off birds, though she knew it had to be done.

Some of the buds could be cut; she would gather them before she went in. She was stooping over the bushes when a squawk of outrage erupted above her head and something went scuttling and scraping along the trunk of the fir tree. A big jay swooped out of the green branches, yelling indignantly, and sat down in the topmost branches of the oak, where it swayed and scolded like an animated blue flower.

Ruth looked up and was rewarded by the sight of a face, triangular and furry, peering calmly down at her from the foliage, like the famous disembodied head of the Cheshire cat. She recognized the cat from earlier visits, and yielded to an impulse born of exuberance and the springlike weather.

“Sammie, aren't you ashamed! Chasing birds is not nice.”

Sammie gave her a contemptuous blink and vanished, not in stages like the fictitious cat, but all at once. The scraping noise began again, accompanied by quaking branches, and then a sleek tan-and-brown form leaped the last twenty feet to land on its feet not far from Ruth's. The cat immediately rolled over on its rear end and began to clean its tail with frantic energy.

“You're a pretty thing,” Ruth said admiringly, and the cat paused, uncannily, to give her a glimpse of two eyes as blue as the back feathers of the jay before it resumed its washing. Its royal self-possession left Ruth amused and absurdly out of countenance. She was familiar with Mr. Eliot's advice on addressing cats, though she had never had occasion to put it into practice. Now, however, it appeared that she had been presumptuous.

“Oh, cat,” she began, following the authority, and then jumped as a voice boomed out.

“Bad girl! So that's where you've gotten to!”

For a wild second Ruth was sure the voice, from a source not immediately apparent, was addressing her. She looked around, and, as she saw the face from which the voice had issued, suspended moonlike upon the top of the back fence, she realized that it had been addressing the animal. The face she raised was pink with amusement, and the face on the fence responded with a beam of obvious admiration.

“Good morning, good morning, my dear Mrs. Bennett! I must apologize for our bad child. Is she annoying you?”

“Not at all. She's a beauty, isn't she?”

“Well, we—yes, we think so. Mrs. DeVoto and I. Please feel quite free, however, to evict her if she becomes churlish. Though members of that breed rarely do so. Patronizing, contemptuous, even downright insulting; but never losing the true aristocratic demeanor.”

“I'm sure,” Ruth murmured. Mr. DeVoto, she recalled, was a retired official of the Department of State. He had something to do with protocol. He was a nice little man, though; he had swept off his genteel golf cap at the sight of her, and his bald head gleamed pinkly in the sunlight.

“Well, Mrs. Bennett,” he went on, “if you are sure that our feline friend does not disturb you, perhaps I will not venture to climb over your fence in order to retrieve her.”

“Oh, I'll enjoy her company. But if you want her back I'll be delighted to hand her to you.”

“That would hardly be feasible, I fear, though I do thank you for offering so kindly. Kai Lung does not care to be handled except by intimates. Not that she would—er—scratch.” Mr. DeVeto's voice sank, as if he were mentioning something faintly obscene. “Dear me, no. She would simply evade your hand if you tried to touch her.”

“Yes,” Ruth said absently. The bush on the end might be pruned; there seemed to be dead wood there…. Then, belatedly, she realized what the man had said, and she exclaimed, “Kai Lung! Isn't her name Sammie?”

“Sammie? Good heavens—gracious me—why, no. She is a female cat, to begin with.”

“No wonder she wouldn't speak to me,” Ruth said, smiling. “I've not only been familiar, I've been wrong.”

“Why would you think her name was Sammie?” Mr. DeVoto was clearly aghast at the very idea.

“Just that I heard someone calling, at night, and I assumed he was calling a pet. There's no reason why I should have thought it was—er—Kai Lung, except that she's the only cat I've seen about, and I know the dog on the south side has another name.”

“I can assure you I have not been calling. Good gracious, Mrs. Bennett, I hope you do not think that I would be so thoughtless as to—”

“Of course not. It must be some other cat, or dog, owner.”

“I cannot imagine who.” Mr. DeVeto's chin sank out of sight as he prepared to retire. “There are no other pets in this block, except for that unattractive beast next door. Well, Mrs. Bennett, it has been most pleasant chatting with you. Perhaps you might join us one evening for a glass of sherry.”

“That would be nice.”

“My wife will telephone you, then. In the meantime, I do hope you enjoy your gardening.”

He lifted the hat he had been holding and replaced it on his head with such perfect timing that, for a second, it seemed to sit suspended on top of the fence as the face below sank out of sight. Ruth allowed herself a broad grin as soon as the face had disappeared, but it was a friendly sort of grin. He really was a nice little man.

She did enjoy her gardening, and she had quite a heap of leaves to show for her efforts when she finished. She had another cup of coffee sitting on the bench built around the oak, and Kai Lung sat beside her and condescended to sample the cream. Then she wound herself into a ball and went to sleep in the sun, and Ruth went back to clipping dead roses. It was a very pleasant day. There was no reason at all why, as she prepared to go in, Ruth should find herself speculating on the identity of the elusive creature named Sammie, and wondering whether he had, in fact, ever come home.

 

II

The weather held all that week, providing conversation for hundreds of dinner parties. On Friday afternoon Ruth left work early and took a cab home; she was perspiring slightly as she came in the front door, and was not really looking forward to cleaning house and cooking a meal. The first thing she heard was the sound of the vacuum cleaner. In the living room she found Sara, wearing an apron which completely covered her brief skirt, putting the finishing touches on a room which shone with wax and elbow grease.

“Well, that's the pleasantest sight I've seen all day,” Ruth exclaimed, as her niece, seeing her enter, switched off the vacuum. “My dear girl, how nice of you!”

“You didn't think I was going to let you do all this by yourself, did you? I don't have any Friday afternoon classes.”

“But it's finished; I couldn't have done better myself. All we need now are the flowers. I brought some home with me, they're in the hall.”

“What kind?”

“Some carnations and the inevitable chrysanthemums, I'm afraid, but I found some beauties. That lovely bronze. This is a hybrid, with gold and copper streaks.”

“I like mums.” Sara wound the cord around the cleaner and shoved it towards the door. “What shall I put them in, the blue Delft pots?”

“That would be good. The white ones can go in the copper vases, and the carnations in the silver. There ought to be a few roses left; I'd planned those for the dining room.”

“They've been gotten. Take a look.”

Ruth pushed open the sliding doors across the hall from the drawing room, and exclaimed with pleasure. The dining room was a dark room, abutting on the neighboring house so closely that that side had been left without windows. Instead of running the full length of the house like the drawing room, it was backed by a high old-fashioned butler's pantry and the kitchen; hence its only outside light came from the street windows, which were kept curtained because they were so close to the sidewalk. The wall sconces and the chandelier had been electrified, and they gave a warm, rich light. The furniture was heavy and dark. Sara had polished it till it reflected objects, and Ruth had mended the worn spots in the exquisite petit point covering the chairs. The table was already set, with Ruth's best damask and silver and crystal; the beautiful old Delft in the corner cupboard, with its scalloped border, had been washed, and the tall silver candlesticks held bayberry candles whose faded green matched the muted shade of the walls.

“Everything is perfect,” Ruth said gratefully. “There's nothing for me to do.”

“Except the cooking!”

“Yes, I'd better start the rolls. They'll have to rise twice.”

“It's such a job. Why didn't you get frozen rolls?”