Shirley Murphy: Cat to the Dogs

And speak of the devil, here came Dirken down the stairs, stamping and yawning, his red hair curled over his collar, his teal green polo shirt straining tight over sleek muscles. Settling into a chair beside the fire, treating Lucinda to his charming Irish grin, Dirken was all Gaelic magnetism: testosterone and guile. For Dulcie, Dirken Greenlaw's appeal grew less each day, with each successive argument.

"Any coffee, Aunt Lucinda?''

"In the kitchen, Dirken. It's freshly brewed."

He didn't move, but eyed her, waiting. She smiled back at him, but didn't rise, and Dulcie wanted to cheer-Lucinda was no longer leaping up to fetch Dirken's morning brew.

Immediately after Shamas's death, Lucinda, in an uncharacteristically decisive move, had begun arrangements to sell the house; the papers had been drawn by the time Dirken arrived.

Dirken had put a stop to the sale. Dulcie had watched him pace the parlor alternately cajoling and intimidating Lucinda, playing on her uncertainty, telling her she would throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars if she didn't keep the house and let it increase in value as all real estate was increasing along the California coast.

The house was in a living trust, with Lucinda as her own trustee. If she sold it, the proceeds would go into the trust, and she could spend them as she liked.

Apparently Dirken thought that Lucinda, in some bizarre change of character, would throw away the money in wild debauchery, leaving no cash for the clan-for Dirken, himself, to squander.

Of course Lucinda could revoke any part of the trust; but she was not often so quick to take action as she had been to try to sell the house; generally, the old lady had a hesitant nature. Maybe, Dulcie thought, Dirken was banking on that, hoping Lucinda would die before she changed anything about the trust. He argued, he harassed, and if Newlon was not around to stand up for her, Lucinda would grow very quiet, then soon slip away alone-sometimes these human complications were enough to give a cat fits.

Get some spine, Dulcie would think, feeling her claws stiffen. Don't let Dirken bully you! Send him packing, send the whole tribe packing. Oh, she wanted to shout, get a life, Lucinda. Don't just roll over for them! Sell the house, do something wild and extravagant with the money! Go to Europe. Spend it on diamonds. Don't leave a cent to that clan! Lucinda was so docile that Dulcie wanted to snatch her up and shake some sense into her; if their roles had been reversed, if Dulcie were bigger than Lucinda, she'd have done it, too.

"You're up mighty early, Aunt Lucinda."

"I'm always up early, my dear. And what brings you down at this hour?" Lucinda poured fresh tea for herself and sat cradling her cup, looking quietly into the fire as if attempting to hold close around her the tranquility of her early-morning solitude.

"About an hour ago," Dirken said, "I thought I heard noises outside. I went out, tramped around. Did you hear anything?"

"Not a thing, my dear. What kind of noise?"

"You must have been dead to the world. When I came in, I knocked at your bedroom door, but I guess you didn't hear me. Why do you lock your bedroom, Aunt Lucinda?"

Lucinda's eyes widened. "Why would you try my bedroom door, Dirken? I lock it because I don't want someone barging in unannounced, certainly not before daylight."

"A bedroom lock with a key," Dirken said. "So you can go out and lock it behind you." He hadn't the decency to apologize for his snooping, or even to look embarrassed; he simply turned his face away, scowling with anger.

"I expect you'll be working on the house again this morning, Dirken?"

The young man rose, heading for the kitchen and his coffee. In the doorway he turned, watching Lucinda, the firelight catching at his red hair. "I must work on it, Aunt Lucinda. The house needs so much repair. So much to do, if we're to save this old place-save your inheritance."

His tone implied that if he didn't undertake such refurbishing, the house would collapse within weeks, its remains sinking tiredly into the weedy yard, and Lucinda would be out on the street.

Lucinda, Dulcie thought, must not know much about houses. Dirken's repair and replacement of some of the lap siding had been grossly shoddy work. And Dulcie had observed with considerable interest his curious method of patching the concrete foundation. It did not appear to her that that little project had anything to do with strengthening the decrepit structure.

She had learned, from watching Clyde and Charlie fix up Clyde's recently purchased apartment building, a good deal about such repairs-though Clyde limited his work mostly to tear-out. But Dulcie had seen how siding should be applied, and how a crumbling foundation looked; she had spent hours lying on the sunny brick patio beside Joe waiting for mice to be dislodged by the workers and observing just such reconstruction operations.

And how arrogant Dirken was about the supposed repairs. His attitude had been, ever since he arrived, not one of tenderness toward his newly widowed aunt, but of confrontation. Not the behavior of a nurturing young relative caring for his uncle's frail old widow, but of a selfish young man out for his own gain.

Nor did the rest of the Greenlaw clan spend any time comforting Lucinda; they were either harassing her or prowling the village on endless sightseeing excursions, rudely fingering the wares in Molena Point's expensive shops, leaving grease stains and torn wrappings, their loud complaints seeming to echo long after they had departed. And in the evenings, in Lucinda's parlor, they were no more pleasant, quibbling about the sale of the house, turning the prefuneral gathering into a bad-tempered brawl.

Send them packing, Dulcie would think, crouching on the fence, her ears back, her tail lashing. She'd hardly been in the public library in two weeks, where usually she spent several hours a day greeting the patrons and playing with the children. She meant to do better; she was, after all, the official library cat, but she couldn't stop racing across the village to Lucinda's, to watch the drama unfolding there. Some force was building, she thought. A confluence of emotions and events that was just the beginning of a larger drama, she was certain of it. And she didn't want to miss a minute. Whatever lay in Lucinda's immediate future, Dulcie wanted to know about it.

But the most puzzling twist of all was that, while the Greenlaws were so prickly and unpleasant to Lucinda, on the rare evenings that they settled in for a round of Irish storytelling, filling Lucinda's parlor nearly to bursting, something strange happened: their attitudes were totally different. Suddenly the frail parlor seemed no longer in danger of collapse under their fierce emoting. On storytelling nights a kind of magic sprang alive among the Greenlaws. They seemed gender, easier with one another, nurturing, and warm.

And Lucinda was easier, too. The old woman seemed drawn to the family, clasping her hands at their tales, weeping or laughing with them. They seemed a family, then, this obstreperous clan, and Lucinda no longer an outsider against whom they were solidly ranked.

Wilma said it was the old family stories and family history, which Shamas had told so well, that had first drawn Lucinda to him, that Shamas's commitment to the old ways was perhaps the only real thing about him, that surely this had been the strongest tie between the mismatched couple. Every marriage, Wilma said, must have a fabric of shared philosophy to tie it together. Wilma truly believed that. For Shamas and Lucinda, that richness had come from the old myths that had been handed down for generations through the Greenlaw family.

And oh, those tales drew Dulcie. On warm evenings when the parlor windows were open and she could hear the stories, she would slip across the yard and up a half-rotten rose trellis to cling beside the screen, listening.