Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"We think seventy-three."

"Aren't there laws?" Matt asked.

"City regulations," Seraphina corrected in a voice that was pure schoolteacher. "Her cats keep her happy. Who's going to complain about how many she keeps?"

"Maybe . . . somebody," Temple said.

Both of them looked at her, the Silent Woman through all of this.

"Miss Tyler was getting odd phone calls," Temple began, thinking. "No wonder she ended up so hysterical tonight.

That's a lot of pressure for an old lady living alone to take, with nothing but watch cats around."

"Phone calls?" Matt was suddenly incisive, as he had not been all evening, but just as he had been when Temple had limped home after being assaulted in the Goliath parking ramp a few weeks before. "What kind of phone calls? Obscene?"

Sister Seraphina, in shock, which seemed foreign to her, sat down on a shapeless easy chair"-and half-rose when a sleeping cat rocketed oil' the cushion and into the darkness.

"Obscenely weird," Temple said. "Hissing sounds. Maybe wheezy breathing. And when I was over here feeding the Cats this evening, she mentioned sounds and lights outside the house."

Seraphina shook her head. "She was always calling the police about that, but they never found anything. They finally stopped coming."

Matt lifted a tiny, but adult, white cat from the third step of the stairs and sat down. The harsh hall light above painted his face with deep shadows of strain, or of thought.

"I got a call at the hotline from an elderly woman not long ago . . ."

"That must have been Blandina," Sister Seraphina said. "She called us at the convent at least twice a day."

After a silence, Temple spoke. "She was old, she was alone and frightened, she cried wolf to everyone who would listen. What if there really is a wolf?"

"Why?" Matt demanded.

"Well, the reason I'm here---" Matt looked alarmed as Sister Seraphina's expression grew alert, but Temple wasn't about to tattle on Matt's missing driver's license to old Teacher Seraphina, no way. The generations had to stick up for each other, no matter what "_is that Miss Tyler's niece, Peggy Wilhelm--"

"Darling girl," Seraphina interrupted enthusiastically.

"Never abandoned her aunt,"

"Anyway," Temple went on for Matt's benefit, "she raises purebred Birmans, and is exhibiting them at the cat show downtown this weekend. And one was shaved."

"Shaved?" The question came simultaneously from both listeners.

Temple, assured of a rapt audience now, nodded solemnly. "Shaved from head to tail, and around the body."

Birmans are long-haired cats, and this one was a potential champion in its class, maybe even a Best of Show. Birmans are the sacred cats of Burma, but they're not supposed to have tonsures like monks. This one does. Peggy has to stay and guard her other cats, so I came over in her place to help her aunt feed the kitties last night. I can't help wondering if the incidents are connected."

"Not," said Matt to Seraphina, "to mention the obscene calls to the convent."

"Convent?" Now Temple could express full indignation and ignorance. "What convent?"

"Ours," Seraphina said serenely. "It's really just a large house; there are so few of us left. We Sisters of Charity belong to Our Lady of Guadalupe now," she added for Temple's benefit, "Rose and I and a few others. Blandina was our neighbor and we looked out for her--and the cats when Peggy wasn't around."

"Someone is making obscene phone calls to a convent?"

Temple demanded in disbelief. Oh, Alice, lend me your Tylenol-Three, your caterpillar and a full deck of cards!

"To one of our nuns, Sister Mary Monica,"

"She's over ninety and seriously hearing-impaired," Matt explained quickly, as if that made any difference.

"So that's why you're here," Temple charged.

"Guilty," he said, sounding exactly that. "Sister Seraphina called on me because she thought that I, being a hotline counselor, would know about the creeps that do this."

Matt and Sister Seraphina exchanged a quick glance that was not lost on Temple. More was here than met the eye. Oh, boy, was that an understatement!

She decided to stick to the facts she knew, Ma'am, just the facts, and Sergeant Friday could take a flying . . . flip.

"So," said Temple, toting insanities, "Two houses practically next door to each other are receiving nuisance calls, and now one resident is . . . I don't know, either ill or hysterical.

Miss Tyler seemed to have her marbles all in a row when I was here this morning."

"She's been under a lot of pressure," Seraphina said firmly. "Recently she's had a little feud with Father Hernandez, our parish priest. Despite her devout ways and the parish development program, they came to a parting on the issue of whether cats go to heaven." She sighed.

"Oh," Temple said. "I was raised Unitarian. I'm not good on this theology stuff."

Seraphina's smile was the kind that would melt barbed wire. "Neither was Father Hernandez," she said. "We tell children that heaven will be what they imagine. Why can't we tell old people, who are closer than us to both childish simplicity and heaven, what they need to hear? Father Hernandez refused to allow even a scintilla of chance that cats could cajole Saint Peter for entry. Blandina was furious, and worse, frightened. Those cats are all she has."

"Besides her niece," Temple put in.

"A niece, however devoted, is not the same as the creatures she saved, as the creatures who came to this house and found a haven here. Her rescued cats made Blandina feel useful, and that is a boon at any age." Seraphina sighed again, though she did not strike Temple as the sighing type under other circumstances.

Temple considered that old nuns were not so different from elderly maiden ladies who had too many cats and thought that their time had passed, that they could save no one but themselves and a few dozen abandoned animals. Except that nuns tended to go in for abandoned souls. Was Matt one?

In the dark of early morning, the cats hid and moved and hungered for food. Like a school of silent fish, they shifted through the vast depths of the old house, now missing its mistress. Temple thought of the tinfoil troughs she had filled not a day before, and of how empty they would soon be, and of how empty this house would be without Blandina. She saw the cane abandoned against the bedroom wall, and heard the cats crying for love and food, food and love.

She saw an Outsider who railed at the safeness of all little worlds, who dialed deaf, ancient nuns with even more ancient obscenities, who harassed old women and cats. She remembered the things the old woman, wandering, had said in her bed, and became profoundly disturbed.

"Blandina had no hearing problem," Temple said. "Maybe she went out to face the night lights and sounds tonight. What made her sick? What made her so sick at heart and soul that she thought of Christ betrayed by Peter?

I'm not particularly religious." Temple confessed, "but wasn't there a lot of the New Testament in what she said tonight?"

They were watching her, the old woman and the man she did not know.

"There was fresh dirt on Miss Tyler's cane tip," Temple said, "In the bedroom."

When they rose, it was a foregone conclusion.

Seraphina led them through the house's labyrinthine ways to the back. Dawn was bleaching the horizon white. The bushes flared like black fires against the sky.

Cats milled around their feet in the kitchen. Cats clamored for milk and honey and Yummy Tum-tum-tummy.

They went outside. No cocks crowed.

The garden was still and empty. Blandina would not trust her precious cats to an outside environment, and most rescued cats disdained the cold, cruel outer world that had orphaned them.

The three of them went their separate ways in the garden, lost in separate thoughts, searching separate ways.