After the Plague

My Widow

CAT PERSON

My widow likes cats. No one knows exactly how many cats inhabit the big solid old redwood house I left her, but after several generations of inbreeding and depositing fecal matter in select corners and in an ever-growing mound on the mantelpiece, their numbers must reach into the thirties, perhaps even the forties. There are cats draped like bunting over every horizontal surface in the house, and when they mew in concert for their cat chow and their tins of mashed fish heads, the noise is enough to wake the dead, if you’ll pardon the expression. She sleeps with these cats, my widow does, or at least as many of them as the antique bed, with its questionable sheets and cat-greased quilt, can accommodate, and all night and into the burgeoning sun-dappled hours of the early morning, there is a ceaseless movement of limb and tongue and the lazy twitching of feline tails. In addition to the cats, my widow once had a pair of vocal and energetic little dogs, of a breed whose name I could never remember, but both have long since run off or been crushed to marrow out on the busy street that winds up from the village and past the rear gate of the house. She had a ferret too, for a while, though ferrets are illegal in the state of California. It didn’t last long. After throttling and partially dismembering a litter of week-old kittens, the animal secreted itself in the crawl space under the house, where it took sick and died. Even now, its mummified corpse subsides gradually into the immemorial dust beneath the floorboards of the kitchen, just under the place where the refrigerator rests, going quietly about its work.

One afternoon, a day or two after the first rain of the winter has converted the dry creek bed out back into a sluice of braided, sepia-colored ripples and long, trailing ropes of eucalyptus bark, my widow is startled by a persistent thumping from the far end of the house. She is, as always, in the kitchen, peering into a steaming pot of chicken-vegetable soup, the only thing she ingests these days, aside from the odd slab of indifferently grilled flank steak and coffee so acidic it’s taken the glaze off the ceramic cup our son made her when he was in the sixth grade. The doorbell, which in my day chimed a carillon from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” is long since defunct, and so my widow takes a while to register the notion that someone is knocking at the front door. The front door, is, after all, a good sixty paces from the kitchen, out the kitchen door and down the long L-shaped hall that leads to the entryway and the grand room beyond it, now a refuge for cats. Still, that is unmistakably the sound of knocking, and you can see the alertness come into her eyes — it could be the postman, she’s thinking, who just the other day (or was it the other week?) brought her a letter from our son, who lives and works in Calcutta, dispensing cornmeal mush and clean bandages to the mendicants there. “I’m coming!” my widow calls in her creaking, octave-challenged voice, and she sets down the stirring spoon amidst the debris of what once was the kitchen counter, wipes her hands on her flannel nightgown, and moves slowly but resolutely down the hall to answer the door.

Standing on the brick doorstep, plainly visible through the ancient flowing glass of the front door, is a young woman in shorts, leggings and some sort of athletic jersey, with stringy black hair, terrible posture, and what appears to be a fur muff tucked under one arm. As my widow gets closer and the indefinite becomes concrete, she sees that the young woman’s eyes are heavily made up, and that the muff has become a kitten of indeterminate breed — black, with a white chest and two white socks. Curious, and pursing her lips in the way she used to when she was a young woman herself, my widow swings open the door and stands there blinking and mute, awaiting an explanation.

“Oh, hi,” the young woman says, squeezing the words through an automatic smile, “sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering …” Unaccountably, the young woman trails off, and my widow, whose hearing was compromised by the Velvet Underground and Nico during a period of exuberance in the last century, watches her lips for movement. The young woman studies my widow’s face a moment, then decides to change tack. “I’m your neighbor, Megan Capaldi?” she says finally. “Remember me? From the school-lunch drive last year?”

My widow, dressed in an old flannel shirt over the faded and faintly greasy flannel nightgown, does not, in fact, remember her. She remains noncommittal. Behind her, from the depths of the house, a faint mewling arises.

“I heard that you were a real cat person, and I just thought — well, my daughter April’s cat had kittens, and we’re looking for good homes for them, with people who really care, and this one — we call her Sniggers — is the last one left.”

My widow is smiling, her face transformed into a girl’s, the striations over her lip pulling back to reveal a shining and perfect set of old lady’s teeth — the originals, beautifully preserved. “Yes,” she says, “yes,” before the question has been asked, already reaching out for the kitten with her regal old hands. She holds it to her a moment, then looks up myopically into the young woman’s face. “Thanks for thinking of me,” she says.

THE ROOF

The roof, made of a composite material guaranteed for life, leaks. My widow is in the bedroom, in bed, crocheting neat four-inch granny squares against some larger need while listening to the murmur of the TV across the room and the crashing impact of yet another storm above her, when the dripping begins. The cats are the first to notice it. One of them, a huge, bloated, square-headed tom with fur like roadkill, shifts position to avoid the cold stinging drops, inadvertently knocking two lesser cats off the west slope of the bed. A jockeying for space ensues, the cats crowding my widow’s crocheting wrists and elbows and leaving a vacant spot at the foot of the bed. Even then, she thinks nothing of it. A voice emanating from the TV cries out, They’re coming — they’re coming through the walls! followed by the usual cacophony of screams, disjointed music and masticatory sounds. The rain beats at the windows.

A long slow hour hisses by. Her feet are cold. When she rubs them together, she discovers that they are also wet. Her first thought is for the cats — have they been up to their tricks again? But no, there is a distinct patter now, as of water falling from a height, and she reaches out her hand to confront the mystery. There follows a determined shuffle through the darkened arena of the house, the close but random inspection of the ceilings with a flashlight (which itself takes half an hour to find), and then the all-night vigil over the stewpot gradually filling itself at the foot of the bed. For a while, she resumes her crocheting, but the steady mesmeric drip of the intruding rain idles her fingers and sweeps her off into a reverie of the past. She’s revisiting other roofs — the attic nook of her girlhood room, the splootching nightmare of her student apartment with the dirty sit-water drooling down the wall into the pan as she heated brown rice and vegetables over the stove, the collapse of the ceiling in our first house after a pipe burst when we were away in Europe — and then she’s in Europe herself, in the rain on the Grand Canal, with me, her first and most significant husband, and before long the stewpot is overflowing and she’s so far away she might as well exist in another dimension.

The roofer, whose name emerged from the morass of the Yellow Pages, arrives some days later during a period of tumultuous weather and stands banging on the front door while rain drools from the corroded copper gutters (which, incidentally, are also guaranteed for life). My widow is ready for him. She’s been up early each day for the past week, exchanging her flannel nightgown for a pair of jeans and a print blouse, over which she wears an old black cardigan decorated with prancing blue reindeer she once gave me for Christmas. She’s combed out her hair and put on a dab of lipstick. Like Megan Capaldi before him, the roofer pounds at the redwood frame of the front door until my widow appears in the vestibule. She fumbles a moment with the glasses that hang from a cord around her neck, and then her face assumes a look of bewilderment: Who is this infant banging at the door?

“Hello!” calls the roofer, rattling the doorknob impatiently as my widow stands there before him on the inside of the glass panel, looking confused. “It’s me — the roofer?” He’s shouting now: “You said you had a leak?”

The roofer’s name is Vargas D’Onofrio, and the minute he pronounces it, it’s already slipped her mind. He has quick, nervous eyes, and his face is sunk into a full beard of tightly wound black hairs threaded with gray. He’s in his early forties, actually, but anyone under seventy looks like a newborn to my widow, and understandably so.

“You’re all wet,” she observes, leading him into the house and up the slow heaving stairs to reveal the location of the leak. She wonders if she should offer to bake him cookies and maybe fix a pouch of that hot chocolate that only needs microwaved water to complete it, and she sees the two of them sitting down at the kitchen table for a nice chat after he’s fixed the roof — but does she have any hot chocolate? Or nuts, shortening, brown sugar? How long has it been since she remembered to buy flour, even? She had a five-pound sack of it in the pantry — she distinctly remembers that — but then wasn’t that the flour the weevils got into? She’s seeing little black bugs, barely the size of three grains of pepper cobbled together, and then she understands that she doesn’t want to chat with this man — or with anybody else, for that matter. She just wants the roof repaired so she can go back to the quiet seep of her old lady’s life.

“Rotten weather,” the roofer breathes, thumping up the stairs in his work boots and trundling on down the upper hallway to the master bedroom, scattering cats as he goes.

My widow has given up on the stewpot and has been sleeping downstairs, in what was once our son’s room. As a result, the antique bed is now soaked through to the springs and oozing water the color of tobacco juice.

“I can patch it,” the roofer says, after stepping out onto the sleeping porch and assaying the roof from the outside, “but you really should have the whole thing replaced once summer comes — and I can do that for you too, and give you a good price. Best price in town, in fact.” The roofer produces a wide bearded closer’s grin that is utterly lost on my widow.

“But that roof,” she says, “was guaranteed for life.”

The roofer just shrugs. “Aren’t they all?” he sighs, and disappears through the door to the sleeping porch. As she pulls the door shut, my widow can smell the keen working scent of the rain loosening the earth around the overgrown flowerbeds and the vaguely fishy odor of wet pavement. The air is alive. She can see her breath in it. She watches the roofer’s legs ride up past the window as he hoists himself up the ladder and into the pall of the rain. And then, as she settles into the armchair in the bedroom, she hears him up there, aloft, his heavy tread, the pounding of nails, and through it all a smell of hot burning tar.

SHOPPING

In her day my widow was a champion shopper. She’d been a student of anthropology in her undergraduate years, and she always maintained that a woman’s job — her need, calling and compulsion — was to accumulate things against the hard times to come. Never mind that we didn’t experience any hard times — aside from maybe having to pinch a bit in grad school or maxing out our credit cards when we were traveling in Japan back in the eighties — my widow was ready for anything. She shopped with a passion matched by few women of her generation. Her collections of antique jewelry, glassware, china figurines and the like would, I think, be truly valuable if she could ever find them in the cluttered caverns and dark byways of the house and basement, and the fine old Craftsman-era couches and chairs strewn through the main rooms are museum pieces, or would be, if the cats hadn’t gotten to them. Even now, despite the fact that she’s become increasingly withdrawn and more than a bit impatient with the fuss and hurry of the world, my widow can still get out and shop with the best of them.

On a day freshened by a hard cold breeze off the ocean, she awakens in my son’s narrow bed to a welter of cats and a firm sense of purpose. Her sister, Inge, ten years her junior and unmarried, is driving up from Ventura to take her shopping at the mall for the pre-Christmas sales, and she is galvanized into action. Up and out of bed at first light, cats mewling at her feet, the crusted pot set atop the crusted burner, coffee brewing, and she slips into a nice skirt and blouse (after a prolonged search through the closet in the master bedroom, where the mattress, unfortunately, continues to ooze a brownish fluid), pulls her hair back in a bun and sits down to a breakfast of defrosted wheat bread, rancid cream cheese and jam so old it’s become a culture medium. In my time, there were two newspapers to chew through and the morning news on the radio, but my widow never bothered herself much with the mechanism of receiving and paying bills (the envelope, the check, the stamp), and the newspapers have been discontinued. As for the radio, my widow prefers silence. She is thinking nothing, staring into space and slowly rotating the coffee cup in her hands, when there is a sharp rap at the kitchen door and Inge’s face appears framed there in the glass panel.

Later, hours later, after lunch at the Thai Palace, after Pic ’n Save, Costco, Ruby’s Thrift Shoppe and the Bargain Basement, my widow finds herself in the midst of a crush of shoppers at Macy’s. She doesn’t like department stores, never has — no bargains to be had, or not usually — but her sister was looking at some tableware for one of their grandnieces, and she finds herself, unaccountably, in the linen department, surrounded by women poking through sheets and pillowcases and little things for the bathroom. There will be a white sale in January, she knows that as well as she knows there will be valentines for Valentine’s Day and lilies for Easter, and since the maid died ten years back she really hasn’t had much need of linens — nobody to change the beds, really — but she can’t help herself. The patterns are so unique, the fabric so fresh and appealing in its neat plastic packaging. Voices leap out around her. Christmas music settles on the air. My widow looks round for a salesperson.

SECOND HUSBAND

His name is—was—Roland Secourt. He was one of those types who never really strain themselves with such trivialities as earning a living during their younger years, and he wound up being a pretty impressive old man, replete with teeth, hair and the ability to walk unaided from the car to the house. I remember him only slightly — he used to give piano lessons to our son a thousand years ago, and I think he managed a parking lot or something like that. At any rate, five years after I bowed out, he began showing up at the front door with one excuse or another — he was driving past and saw the gate was open; he’d picked up six cases of cranberry juice at a sale and didn’t know what to do with it all; he was just wondering if my widow might want to go down to the village for maybe a cocktail and dinner — and before long, my widow, who’d succumbed to the emptiness that afflicts us all, took him in.

She never loved him, though. He was a man, a presence in a deteriorating house full of cats, my shadowy simulacrum. What did he bring with him? Three cardboard boxes full of out-of-date shoes, belt buckles, underwear, a trophy he’d once won in a piano competition. Nine months into the marriage he sucked up his afflatus to crack the holy living hell out of a golf ball on the fourth tee at La Cumbre Country Club (he was golf-fixated, another strike against him), felt a stab under his arm as if someone had inserted one of those gleaming biopsy needles between his ribs, and fell face forward into the turf, dead, without displacing the ball from the tee.

That was a long time ago. My widow didn’t have him around long enough to really get used to him in the way she was used to the walls and the furniture and the cats, so his death, though a painful reminder of what awaits us all, wasn’t the major sort of dislocation it might have been. He was there, and then he was gone. I have no problem with that.

HER PURSE

Her purse was always a bone of contention between us — or her purses, actually. She seemed to have a limitless number of them, one at least for every imaginable occasion, from dining at the White House to hunting boar in Kentucky, and all of them stuffed full of ticket stubs, charge card receipts, wadded-up tissues, cat collars, gum wrappers, glasses with broken frames, makeup in various states of desiccation, crushed fortune cookies, fragments of our son’s elementary school report cards, dice, baby teeth, empty Tic Tac cases, keychains, cans of Mace and a fine detritus of crumbs, dandruff, sloughed skin and chipped nail polish. Only one of these, however, contained her checkbook and wallet. That was the magical one, the essential one, the one she spent a minimum of half an hour looking for every time we left the house, especially when we were on our way to the airport or the theater or a dinner date with A-type personalities like myself who’d specified eight P.M., sharp.

Not that I’m complaining. My widow lived a placid, unhurried existence, no slave to mere schedules, as so many of us were. She radiated calm in a crisis. When things went especially bad — during the ’05 earthquake, for instance — she would fix herself a nice meal, some stir-fry or chicken-vegetable soup, and take a nap in order to put things in their proper perspective. And so what if the movie started at 7:45 and we arrived at 8:30? It was all the more interesting for having to piece together what must have transpired with this particular set of characters while we were looking for purses, parking the car and sprinting hand in hand down the crowded street. The world could wait. What was the hurry?

At any rate, it is that very same totemic purse that turns up missing after her shopping trip. She and her sister arrive at home in a blizzard of packages, and after sorting them out in the driveway and making three trips from car to house, they part just as dusk is pushing the birds into the trees and thickening the shadows in the fronds of the tree ferns I planted thirty years ago. Inge won’t be staying for dinner, nor will she be spending the night. She is eager to get home to her own house, where a pot of chicken-vegetable soup and her own contingent of cats await her. “Well,” she says, casting a quick eye over the welter of packages on the table, “I’m off,” and the door closes on silence.

Days pass. My widow goes through her daily routine without a thought to her purse, until, with the cat food running low, she prepares for a trip to the market in the ancient, battered, hennarot BMW M3 that used to be my pride and joy, and discovers that none of the purses she is able to locate contains her wallet, her keys, her glasses (without which she can’t even see the car, let alone drive it). While the cats gather round her, voicing their complaint, she attempts to retrace her steps of the past few days and concludes finally that she must have left the purse in her sister’s car. Certainly, that’s where it is. Of course it is. Unless she left it on the counter at Ruby’s or the Bargain Basement or even Macy’s. But if she had, they would have called, wouldn’t they?

She tries her sister, but Inge isn’t much for answering the phone these days, a quirk of her advancing years. Why bother? that’s what she thinks. Who is there she wants to hear from? At her age, is there any news that can’t wait? Any news that could even vaguely be construed as good? My widow is nothing if not persistent, however, and on the twelfth ring Inge picks up the phone. “Hello?” she rasps in a voice that was never especially melodious but is now just a deflated ruin. My widow informs her of the problem, accepts a scolding that goes on for at least five minutes and incorporates a dozen ancient grievances, and then she waits on the line for another fifteen minutes while Inge hobbles out to the garage to check the car. Click, click, she’s back on the line and she has bad news for my widow: the purse is not there. Is she sure? Yes, yes, she’s sure. She’s no idiot. She still has two eyes in her head, doesn’t she?

For the next two hours my widow searches for the phone book. Her intention is to look up the phone number of the stores they’d visited, and the Thai Palace too — she’s concerned, and the cats are hungry. But the phone book is elusive. After evicting a dozen cats from the furniture in the main room, digging through the pantry and the closet and discovering any number of things she’d misplaced years ago, she loses track of what she’s looking for, lost in a reverie over an old photo album that turns up in the cabinet under the stove, amidst the pots and pans. She sits at the table, a crescent of yellow lamplight illuminating her features, and studies the hard evidence of the way things were. There are pictures of the two of us, smiling into the camera against various exotic backdrops, against Christmas trees and birthday cakes, minarets and mountains, a succession of years flipping by, our son, his dog, the first cat. Her heart — my widow’s heart — is bursting. It’s gone, everything is gone, and what’s the sense of living, what’s it all about? The girlhood in Buffalo, the college years, romance and love and hope and the prospect of the future — what was the sense in it, where had it gone? The pictures cry out to her. They scream from the page. They poke her and prod her till she’s got no breath left in her body. And just then, when the whole world seems to be closing down, the phone rings.

BOB SMITH, A.K.A. SMYTHE ROBERTS, ROBERT P. SMITHEE, CLAUDIO NORIEGA AND JACK FROUNCE

“Hello?” my widow answers, her voice like the clicking of the tumblers in an old lock.

“Mrs. B.?” a man’s voice inquires.

My widow is cautious but polite, a woman who has given out her trust, time and again, and been rewarded, for the most part, with kindness and generosity in return. But she hates telephone solicitors, especially those boiler-room types that prey on the elderly — the TV news has been full of that sort of thing lately, and the A.A.R.P. newsletter too. She hesitates a moment, and then, in a barely audible voice, whispers, “Yes?”

“My name is Bob Smith,” the caller returns, “and I’ve found your purse. Somebody apparently dumped it in a trash bin outside of Macy’s — no cash left, of course, but your credit cards are intact, and your license and whatnot. Listen, I was wondering if I might bring it to you — I mean, I could mail it, but who can trust the mail these days, right?”

My widow makes a noise of assent. She doesn’t trust the mail, either. Or, actually, she’s never really thought about it one way or another. She shuts her eyes and sees the mailman in his gray-blue shorts with the black stripe up the side, his neatly parted hair cut in the old-fashioned way, his smile, and the way his eyes seem to register everything about everybody on his route as if he took it personally, as if he were policing the streets out front and back of her house and stuffing mailboxes at the same time. Maybe she does trust the mail. Maybe she does.

Bob Smith says, “The mail’d take three days, and I’d have to find a box for the thing—”

My widow says what Bob Smith has been hoping she’ll say: “Oh, you don’t have to go to all that bother. Honestly, I’d come to you, but without my driving glasses — they’re in the purse, you see, and I do have another pair, several pairs, but I can’t seem to, I can’t—”

“That’s all right,” he croons, his voice flowing like sugar water into a child’s cup, “I’m just glad to help out. Now, is this address on your driver’s license still current?”

My widow is waiting at the door for him when he steps through the front gate, a pair of legs like chopsticks in motion, his hair a dyed fluff of nothing combed straight up on his head as if he were one of those long-pants comedians of her father’s era, a face gouged with wrinkles and a smile that makes his eyes all but disappear into two sinkholes of flesh. He wouldn’t have got any farther than the gate if I was around, and I don’t care how old I might have been, or how frail — this man is trouble, and my widow doesn’t know it. Look out, honey, I want to say. Watch out for this one.

But she’s smiling her beautiful smile, the smile that even after all these years has the two puckered dimples in it, her face shining and serene, and “Hello, hello, Mr. Smith,” she’s saying, “won’t you come in?”

He will. He ducks reflexively on stepping through the door, as if his head would crack the doorframe, a tall man with dangling hands, a grubby white shirt and a tie that looks as if it’d been used to swab out the deep fryer at McDonald’s. In his left hand, a plain brown shopping bag, and as she shuts the door behind him and six or seven cats glance up suspiciously from their perch on the mantel, he holds it out to her. “Here it is,” he says, and sure enough, her purse is inside, soft black leather with a silver clasp and the ponzu sauce stain etched into the right panel like an abstract design. She fumbles through the purse for her wallet, thinking to offer him a reward, but then she remembers that there’s no money in it — hadn’t he said on the phone that the money was gone? “I wanted to—” she begins, “I mean, you’ve been so nice, and I—”

Bob Smith is not listening. He’s wandered out into the arena of the grand room, hands clasped behind his back, dodging mounds of discarded magazines, balled-up skeins of yarn, toppled lamps and a cat-gutted ottoman. He has the look of a prospective buyer, interested, but not yet committed. “Pretty old place,” he says, taking his time.

My widow, plumped with gratitude, is eager to accommodate him. “Nineteen-oh-nine,” she says, working the purse between her hands. “It’s the only Prairie style—”

“The rugs and all,” he says, “they must be worth something. And all this pottery and brass stuff — you must have jewelry too.”

“Oh, yes,” my widow says, “I’ve been collecting antique jewelry for, well, since before I was an antique myself,” and she appends a little laugh. What a nice man, she’s thinking, and how many out there today would return a lady’s purse? Or anything, for that matter? They’d stolen the lawn mower right out of the garage, stripped the tires off the car that time she’d broken down in Oxnard. She’s feeling giddy, ready to dial Inge the minute he leaves and crow about the purse that’s come back to her as if it had wings.

“Your husband here?” Bob Smith asks, picking his way back to her like a man on the pitching deck of a ship. There seems to be something stuck to the bottom of his left shoe.

“My husband?” Another laugh, muted, caught deep in her throat. “He’s been gone twenty years now. Twenty-one. Or no, twenty-two.”

“Kids?”

“Our son, Philip, lives in Calcutta, India. He’s a doctor.”

“So there’s nobody here but you,” Bob Smith says, and that’s when my widow feels the first faint stirring of alarm. A cat rises slowly on the periphery of her vision, stretching itself. The sun slants through the windows, irradiating the skeleton of the dead palm in the big pot in the corner. Everything is still. She just nods her head in response to the question and clutches the purse to her, thinking, It’s all right, just show him to the door now, and thank him, tell him the reward’s coming, in the mail, just leave an address …

But Bob Smith isn’t ready to leave. In fact, he’s hovering over her now, his face as rucked and seamed as an old mailbag, his eyes glittering like something that’s been crushed in the street. “So where’s the jewelry then?” he says, and there’s nothing of the good Samaritan left in his voice now, no bonhomie, no fellow feeling or even civility. “Can you even find it in this shithole? Huh?”

My widow doesn’t say a word.

He has a hand on her wrist suddenly, clamped there like a manacle, and he’s tugging at her, shouting in her face. “You stupid old bitch! You’re going to pay — shit, yes, you’re going to pay. Any cash? Huh? Cash? You know what that is?” And then, before she has time to answer, he snakes out his other hand, the right one, and slaps her till she jerks back from the grip of him like an animal caught in the jaws of a trap.

My widow hasn’t been slapped in seventy-odd years, not since she got into a fight with her sister over a pan of brownies when their mother stepped out of the kitchen to answer the phone. She’s in shock, of course — everything’s happened so fast — but she’s tough, my widow, as tough in the core of her as anybody on earth. Nobody slaps her. Nobody comes into her house on false pretenses and — well, you get the picture. And in the next instant her free hand comes up out of the purse with an ancient can of Mace clutched in it, and because this is a good and fitting universe I’m constructing here, the aerosol spray still works despite an expiration date ten years past, and before she can think, Bob Smith is writhing on the floor in a riot of cat feces, dust balls and lint, cursing and rubbing at his eyes. And more: when my widow turns for the door, ready to scurry out onto that brick porch and scream till her dried-up old lungs give out, who should be standing there at the door but Megan Capaldi, screaming herself.

IN HER OWN WORDS

As I say, my widow doesn’t get the newspaper, not anymore. But Megan Capaldi brings her two copies the next day, because her picture is on the front page under the caption, “FEISTY OCTOGENARIAN THWARTS BURGLARY.” There she is, hunched and squinting into the camera, arm in arm with Megan Capaldi, who dialed 911 on her cell phone and escorted my widow to safety while the San Roque Municipal Police handcuffed Bob Smith and secured him in the back of their cruiser. In the photograph, which shows off the front of the house to real advantage, I think, the windows especially, with their intricate design and the wooden frames I scraped, sanded and painted at least three times in the course of my tenure here, my widow is smiling. So too is Megan Capaldi, who wouldn’t be bad-looking at all if only she’d stand up straight. Posed there, with the house mushrooming over them in grainy black and white, you can hardly tell them apart.

On page 2, at the end of the article, my widow is given an opportunity to reflect on her ordeal. “It’s a shame, is what it is,” she is quoted as saying, “the way people like this prey on the elderly — and don’t forget the telemarketers, they’re just as bad. It didn’t used to be this way, before everybody got so suspicious of everybody else, and you didn’t have to triple-lock your doors at night, either.”

There was more, much more, because the young woman reporter they sent out to the house had been so sympathetic — a cat person herself — but there were space limitations, and the story, while novel, didn’t have the sort of grit and horror the paper’s readers had come to expect. Any number of times during the interview, for instance, my widow had begun with the phrase “When my husband was alive,” but none of that made the cut.

NIGHT

It is Christmas, a clear cold night, the sky above the house staggering under the weight of the stars. My widow doesn’t know about the stars — or if she does, it’s only theoretically. She doesn’t leave the house much, except for shopping, of course, and shopping is almost exclusively a daytime activity. At the moment, she is sitting in the grand room, on the cherrywood couch in front of the fireplace, where the ashes lie heaped, twenty-two years cold. She has been knitting, and the electric blue needles and balls of yarn lie in her lap, along with three or four cats. Her head is thrown back, resting on the broad wooden plane of the couch, and she is staring up at the high sloping ceiling above her, oblivious to the sky beyond and the cold pinpoints of light crowding the plane of the ecliptic. She’s not thinking about the roof, or the roofer, or rain. She’s not thinking about anything.

There is little evidence of the holidays here — a few Christmas cards scattered across the end table, a wreath of artificial pine she draped over one of the light sconces six years ago. She doesn’t bother anymore with the handcrafted elves and angels from Gstaad, the crèche made of mopane wood, or even the colored lights and bangles. All that was peerless in its time, the magic of the season, our son coming down the stairs in his pajamas, year after year, growing taller and warier, the angels tarnished, the pile of gift-wrapped presents growing in proportion, but that time is past. She and Inge had planned to get together and exchange gifts in the afternoon, but neither of them had felt much enthusiasm for it, and besides, Inge’s car wouldn’t start. What I’d wanted here was for our son to pull up front in a cab, having flown in all the way from the subcontinent to be with his mother for Christmas — and he’d been planning on it too, planning to surprise her, but a new and cruelly virulent strain of cholera swept through the refugee camps, and he couldn’t get away.

So she sits there by the ashes of the cold fire, listening to the furtive groans and thumps of the old house. The night deepens, the stars draw back, higher and higher, arching into the backbone of the sky. She is waiting for something she can’t name, a beautiful old lady clothed in cats, my widow, just waiting. It is very still.