The Beastly Bride

THE MARGAY’S CHILDREN Richard Bowes

Not to boast, but I’d say I’m pretty good as a godfather. As an actual parent, I’d doubtless have been a disaster. But I have six godchildren, and I love all of them. Selesta is the second eldest and my secret favorite. When she was real small, three and four years old, I had Mondays off and her mother, my friend Joan Mata, would leave her with me while she kept doctors’ appointments and met her design clients in the city.

That was when Selesta and I first talked about cats. At the time, I had an apartment on Second Avenue in the teens, and on the ground floor of the building facing mine was a row of small shops, each of which had a cat. Selesta took a great interest in them. That could just have been because she couldn’t have a cat of her own.

The Italian deli had a majestic tricolor cat named Maybelline. As a deli cat she had plenty of food, numerous admirers whom she would allow to pet her as she sat in the sun by the front door, and mice to keep her busy at night.

The Russian cobbler next door had a thin gray cat with a truncated tail that twitched back and forth. A shoe repair shop has no food and probably few mice. The cobbler was thin and gray himself, and when I once asked him the cat’s name he just shook his head, like he’d never heard of such a thing. So I decided to call him Hank, and Selesta agreed with me.

The third store was a Vietnamese nail and hair and massage shop with elaborate neon signage. It employed a trio of exotic ladies with elaborate nails, and one very silly man. Their cat was a Siamese named Mimi or something like that. Mimi had a wardrobe of exotic sweaters and collars and even booties.

She was usually carried by one of the ladies. When she passed by, the other cats’ noses and ears twitched, as if they could sense a cat nearby but couldn’t tell where it was.

To amuse ourselves, Selesta and I made up stories about the three cats and their adventures. Once they all went out to find a pair of red striped socks for Hank on his birthday. Another time they went to the moon, which was run by a bunch of gangster mice.

Maybe there I should have discouraged her interest. However, I believe Joan had asked me to be the godfather of her only child because we went back so far and shared so many secrets.

Eventually Selesta’s parents moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, she started school, and our Monday afternoons and the adventures of the store cats were no more.

It was a few years later, when she was eight or nine, that Selesta first asked me how her mother and I had become friends. It was the Wednesday after her birthday and I’d just taken her to see a matinee performance of Cats on Broadway. That had been her wish, and her mother had no objection.

The kick in taking a kid to the theater is seeing and sharing her unbridled wonder. Afterward we discussed the show and let the crowd carry us to the Times Square subway station. I noticed that Selesta now had her mother’s green eyes flecked with gold.

“My favorite part was the end where the cat goes up to heaven,” she said.

“On the old rubber tire,” I replied. “That’s the way it always happens with cats.”

“My mother says she has allergies so I can’t have a cat or dog.”

This sudden swerve in our conversation took me by surprise. “She is allergic, honey,” I said automatically and immediately regretted it. Kids are uncanny. Selesta knew I had lied, just as she suspected that her mother was lying.

She followed it up by saying, “Once when I was little you told me you and Mommy lived in a house with a mystery cat. Like Macavity in the show.”

Macavity, the villain of the musical, seemed to me too over-the-top to be very scary. The animal Selesta referred to had been very quiet and quite real.

“That was long before you were born or even thought of,” I said as the matinee crowds carried us down the subway stairs.

It bothered me that I had no recollection of ever having told her about the cat or about Anise’s Place on East Tenth Street. That was the semi-crash pad where her mother, Joan Mata, and

I first met back in those legendary times, the late 1960s.

“What was the cat’s name?”

By then we were waiting amid a crowd of commuters at 33rd Street for the PATH train to Hoboken. I began the story, and as I did, she listened with exactly the same rapt expression she’d had at the show.

“He was called Trebizon. That was an ancient city far away on the Black Sea. Anise, his owner, was a lady who had started to get a doctorate in history before she became a hippie and decided to let a bunch of people come live with her.”

“You and my mother were hippies!” The idea amused her.

“I guess I was. You’d have to ask your mother if she was.” Back then, my foothold in the city had been fragile. A stupid romantic quarrel, the kind a young man has at twenty-one, had put me out of the place where I’d been living and sent me crashing at Anise’s. But I didn’t go into that.

“What was Trebizon like?”

“He was a big old orange cat who seemed very smart.” I didn’t tell her that the people living in that neighborhood and in that apartment had achieved a really rarefied degree of psychic awareness and mind expansion. Apparently Trebizon shared this.

“It seemed he always had a favorite. When I first came to stay there, he spent every night on the chest of a very quiet stranger, a kid from the South who slept on the living room couch. Anise joked that the cat had adopted him.

“All of a sudden, every time a newcomer entered the apartment, the cat would get off his chest and sit and watch. The kid would take off all his clothes, kneel down on the floor in front of the new arrival, and kiss his or her feet.”

“He kissed your feet?” She was amused.

“It was creepy and embarrassing. But I noticed other people were pleased when it happened. Like they said to themselves, Finally, people are kissing my feet. I also saw that Trebizon acted like an owner whose pet had done a clever trick.

“I guess word got back to the kid’s family. Because one day his parents appeared and took him home.”

“What did Trebizon do?”

“Found someone else who lived there, a dreamy kind of girl who was studying to be a dancer. The cat slept beside her in this bed in a little alcove near the kitchen. We called her the Flower Girl because she brought home the single roses that gypsy ladies sold in bars and little sprays of lilies of the valley, potted geraniums.

“Then it escalated. She began coming in with bridal bouquets, with boxes of red carnations, huge bunches of violets. The crash pad began to look like a funeral parlor. Trebizon prowled among them, chewed the ferns, and batted the petals that fell to the floor.

“The Flower Girl started to look furtive, haunted. One time she came home with two shopping bags full of yellow daffodils. Another time it was orchids. Stuff she’d probably stolen. She’d put them on the floor around her bed, and Trebizon would lie there like it was his altar.

“Eventually the police nabbed her as she was ripping off a bank of tulips from the Macy’s garden show. With her gone, Trebizon began to notice me.”

The train arrived right then, and we didn’t get seats. I held on to a pole, and Selesta held on to me. We sang scraps of the songs from Cats. She knew a lot of the lyrics. The other passengers pretended we weren’t there.

I hoped my goddaughter would forget what we’d been talking about. Telling the story had reminded me of what it had been like to be young and confused and with no place to hide when a demon closes in.

But as soon as we hit the platform of Hoboken terminal Selesta asked, “Where was my mother when the cat came after you?”

Hoboken twenty years ago was still such a compact, old-fashioned, working-class city that in my memory it’s all black and white like an old newsreel. We walked from the station to Newark Street, where a sign in the shape of a giant hand pointed its finger at the Clam Broth House.

On the way, I told Selesta, “Right when the cat began to stalk me was when your mother appeared. Trebizon sat in the doorway of the room where I slept and stared at me. I had no other place to go and I sat on my bed, wondering what I was going to do.

“Then I looked up and there was this girl a little older than me, wearing the shortest miniskirt in the world. She put her bags in the alcove where the Flower Girl had stayed. Her name was Joan Mata. She looked taller than she was, and she had amazing eyes — green and gold like yours. Your mother had been in Europe for the summer. She and Anise had met at Columbia, and she knew Trebizon from back then.

“I didn’t even have to tell her what was happening. She gave one look at Trebizon, and he ran and hid in the kitchen.”

What Joan had actually done was let out a low growl. Trebizon’s reaction was like that of the cobbler’s cat and the deli cat when Mimi was carried past. His nose and ears twitched; he looked around, scared and confused, like he sensed a cat but couldn’t see one.

Trebizon never came back out of that kitchen. Anise knew something was wrong, but she and the cat were both a bit afraid of Joan.

“Why didn’t Trebizon make my mother allergic?” Selesta asked suddenly.

Before I could think of a reply, a voice said, “The allergies developed later, honey.” Joan Mata stood smiling at the front entrance of the sprawling block-long maze of dining rooms that was the Clam Broth House.

Joan was a designer. She was married to Selesta’s father, the architect Frank Gallen. He was out of town. Their town house was like a showcase for his work and hers. Some part of it was always being rebuilt or redesigned. That week it was the kitchen.

So we ate at the restaurant, which Selesta always loved. The three of us were seated. When Joan put on her glasses to glance at a menu, they seemed to alight on her face for a moment. Like a butterfly.

Selesta recounted scenes from the musical and chunks of our conversation. “And he said he was a hippie, but he didn’t know if you were.”

“Your godfather has it backward,” said Joan. “Everything I owned was in those suitcases. He had a job. It was so cute, every morning in that madhouse, he’d put on his suit and tie and go off to write fashion copy.”

Selesta asked, “What happened to Trebizon?”

Neither of us knew. “I imagine he had a few lives left,” Joan said.

Selesta left us briefly, reluctantly for the ladies’ room, knowing that in her absence secrets would be discussed.

“She asked and I told her a little bit about Trebizon and East Tenth Street.”

“That’s perfect. She’s getting curious, and I’m glad it happened like this and with you.”

“Shouldn’t you tell her about your father?”

She sighed. “She’ll ask and I’ll tell her.”

Over twenty years before, we had known we’d be friends from the moment we met. In late night conversations on the front steps and back fire escape on East Tenth Street, we talked about sex and drugs and parents and trauma.

Joan sat on railings and never lost her balance. She was only a year or two older than I was but knew so much more. Her mother was a well-known lawyer; her father was Antonio Mata, the Mexican painter who did surrealistic paintings that looked like cartoons and who signed himself “Margay.”

That night, for the first time, I questioned her judgment, but said nothing.

About ten years later, when Selesta was in her late teens, a sophomore studying theater at NYU, there was a Friday afternoon when she drove us both out to Long Island. We were going to spend the weekend with her mother and grandmother in the House That Ate the World. It was early June, and the Island was radiant.

That uncanny light you get on that thin, low strip of land on a long afternoon is sunlight reflected off the Atlantic and Long Island Sound.

Selesta was slim but not as painfully thin as she had been a few years before, when her parents divorced and she became bulimic. She had been cured of that, and in high school had lived a tightly scheduled life the point of which, maybe, was to prevent her pondering too much about who she was.

A couple of times over the years, though, we’d talked about her mother and our adventures when we first met. I’d run through my stories of Joan and me dancing at Ondine with Hendrix in the house and talking to Allen Ginsberg in Tompkins Square Park. All the baggage of the tiresomely hip older generation got trotted out.

That day, though, she asked, “You know about ocelots?” I nodded and had a good idea where the conversation was going.

“They’re small; their bodies are a couple of feet long and with a tail almost that long. They have beautiful coats,” she said. “They live all through South America and Mexico. Whenever I go anywhere if they have a zoo I check and see if they have ocelots. San Diego does and Cincinnati.

“Ocelots are shy,” she added. “And, of course, they’re getting scarce because of their fur and the forest disappearing.

“Obviously, though, what I’m really interested in is the margay, a kind of cousin with the same markings. You know about them.”

“They live and hunt in trees,” I said. “They’re nocturnal, very, very shy, and getting rare.”

“You know that because my mother talked to you about this, didn’t she? Back when you were kids. She knew about all this, about her father. You know Margay was his nickname? I first got interested in them when I was about twelve and heard about Grandfather Margay from Grandma Ruth.

“Ruth took me to Mexico last summer. We went to the town where Antonio Mata was born and grew up. There were still people who knew him. We made a special visit to Belize because of this amazing zoo they have. It’s away from the coast with lots of space. More like a nature park with all animals from Central America,” she said.

“I waited outside the margay enclosure, and at dusk I saw one on a high tree branch. Its eyes reflected the light. Other people were there, but it looked at me. Then it was gone.”

As we rolled along the flat prairie that is the Island’s center, late afternoon sunlight made long shadows and gave a kind of magic to the endless strip malls, the buildings with signboards listing dermatologists’ and dentists’ offices, the used-car lots.

Selesta said, seemingly out of nowhere, “Trebizon may have been possessed, but the way he acted with my mother is how a domestic cat reacts to a wild one.”

I realized that Joan must never have talked to her about any of this. “You’re right, honey,” I said. “That’s what it was like.”

Keeping her eyes on the road, she reached over with her left hand and pulled down the shoulder of her blouse. There was a small patch of tawny fur with a touch of black.

“How long have you had that?”

“A few years. It was just a speck, and then it grew. I knew what it was when it appeared. I shaved it at first and was afraid someone would find out. Lately I’ve let it grow.”

I watched her staring at the road, tried to see a cat shape in her head. She glanced my way, and for a moment her eyes did catch the light.

“Your mother had the same thing when I first knew her. She had to get rid of it with electrolysis. Painful stuff.”

“My mother never volunteers information about things like this. When I first got this I asked her what it meant. She mentioned her father very briefly — then told me about laser treatment.”

“But you didn’t want that.”

“I want to remember. Maybe understand something.”

We drove in silence for a while. Then Selesta said, “She was only a few years older than I am now when you met. How much did she know?”

“She had just figured out what had happened to her and to her brother, Luis. She was mad that your grandmother hadn’t been able to tell her more. But I think Ruth must have been in shock herself back then. I think your mother was, too. Maybe that’s what made them so dedicated to their work.”

“Look in that portfolio,” she said and indicated one stuck in between our seats.

It contained photos. The first few were of her grandfather, Antonio Mata. As a young man he was thin and poised. Maybe his head and face seemed a bit streamlined. But I might have been seeing that because of what I knew. He was with a group of young people in one picture at a country house in Mexico. I recognized Frida Kahlo in the crowd. In another picture, Antonio Mata in his shirtsleeves painted on a canvas.

I had seen these before. Joan had shown them to me when I first knew her. There was one of Antonio Mata and Ruth, Joan’s mother, which I remembered having seen. They made a handsome couple. Ruth wore shorts and a man’s shirt.

After her husband’s disappearance, Ruth went to Columbia Law School, married the civil rights lawyer Harry Rosen, and became a legal counsel for Amnesty International.

“Look at the next one,” Selesta said.

This one was new to me. Antonio Mata lay stretched out on the branch of a tree, looking at the camera with cat’s eyes.

“And the next.”

The picture had probably been taken at dusk on a porch. A light was on inside the house. Mata was a bit older than in the other shots. He was poised with his hands on the rails, as if he was going to leap into the gathering dark. He looked like he was trapped. I recognized the porch and the house.

“Your mother gave you these?”

“My grandmother. She took them.”

The next picture was of three children standing on the front porch of the place that Mata had called the House That Ate the World. They ranged in age from nine to maybe three. The oldest was a very serious boy who seemed to be looking at something in the distance. This, I knew was Joan’s brother, Luis. The youngest was Joan’s sister, Catherina, smiling and holding something up to the camera with both hands. Joan was right in between. She gazed up at her brother.

“I’d never seen a picture of her brother.”

“There aren’t many. They say he was very shy around strangers. A true Margay. Just look at him! Those eyes!”

“He died very young.”

“Eighteen,” she said. “Drowned in the Great South Bay a few years after his father disappeared back into Mexico. Water killed the cat. Everyone knew it was suicide.”

It’s tough when a friend you love and respect is doing something you think may be dumb and wrong. “Your mother was still torn up about that and her father’s disappearance when I first knew her,” I said, like I was pleading her case. “She really had no one to talk to.”

Selesta drove in silence. The sun was going down. I looked in her portfolio at the photos she had of Mata paintings. I found The House That Ate the World.

It’s the house in the old rural Hamptons in which Antonio Mata had lived for some years with his wife and children. In the painting it’s distended, bulging. Through open windows and doors flow furniture and phonographs, tennis shoes and radios, refrigerators and easy chairs.

Out of the house and onto the lawn in front and the meadow in back they tumble: cocktail dresses and ice buckets, strollers and overcoats, the possessions of an American household circa 1948.

“Kind of quaint compared to what’s inside an American house today,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s about materialism so much as about wariness and curiosity,” Selesta said. “And maybe fear. He’s a feline in human territory.”

“Are you afraid, honey? Like he was?”

“Sometimes I am. I think it’s good to be a little afraid sometimes.”

We drove for a while before she asked, “Was my mother ever afraid?”

“Not that I saw when she was your age. She only seemed to get scared after you were born.”

We talked a little more about her family. Brief bursts of conversation took place amid stretches of silence.

It was dark when we parked at the entrance to the driveway of the House That Ate the World. Lamps were on inside, but Joan stood on the unlighted porch and smiled as we approached.

“She can see us in the dark,” muttered Selesta. “She just shrugs when I ask her about it.”

We all embraced and Joan asked, “How was traffic?”

“No problem,” said her daughter stepping past her. “How are you?”

By night, it could almost still be the cottage of fifty years before. I caught the tang and murmur of the ocean. A few hundred yards away the tide was coming in.

Through the open windows I saw the easel in the living room with the half-finished painting. Bulbous circa-1950 American cars bore down on the viewer. Antonio Mata had disappeared without finishing it.

“A cat’s-eye view of the highway,” I murmured.

Joan looked at me and then at her daughter, who smiled. Neither said anything, but they moved down the hall to the kitchen, not touching but walking together.

When they were alone, Joan would ask her daughter what she and I had talked about on the way out here. I was glad to have given them that opening.

“Hello, Richie,” said a familiar voice behind me. I turned, and standing at the back porch door was the woman from the 1950s snapshots. Then Ruth Mata Rosen moved and that illusion disappeared. Now she walked with a cane.

Ruth had called me “Richie” the first time we met many years before. There was no reason for it that I’ve ever been able to discover. Nobody else in the world has ever used that nickname for me.

“They’re alone together?” she asked.

“In the kitchen,” I said.

“No yelling? No screams?” she asked. “I don’t necessarily hear. Especially things I don’t want to hear.”

“Quiet so far.”

“At first, with my background in negotiation, I tried to arbitrate their dispute,” said Ruth. “What I discovered was that when you spent twelve years married to the cat man and never asked some basic questions, you’re not dealing from a position of moral authority or common sense.”

“We’ve all done things like that.”

“Truly, have you ever done anything quite like that?”

“Well. ”

“No. I was naïve and bedazzled and just plain stupid. And a lot of misfortune came from that.”

“You did something fine with Selesta.”

“I’d been back to the place where Antonio was born a couple of times. There are still people who remember him as a kid. A few of the locals had folktales about tree cats who can take human form. Rumors ran that his grandmother was one.

“Poor Joan,” Ruth said. “When she was Selesta’s age and wanted so much to find out about her father, there was a travel ban in that area. It was a dangerous place. The government was killing student dissidents. And right then I was busy.”

The kitchen door opened. Selesta emerged and then Joan. A kind of truce seemed to have been arranged.

“Is anyone else hungry?” asked Ruth.

“Yes,” said Joan. “But the sad thing is none of us can cook.” Selesta narrowed her eyes and flashed her teeth. “I can probably rustle up something fresh and tasty from outside.”

Joan winced, but I chuckled. Ruth said, “Suit yourself. But there are take-out menus on the refrigerator door. I thought maybe Thai would be nice.”

In the way of the busy lives we lead, it was a few years before I found myself back at the House That Ate the World. This time I drove out there with Joan and again arrived after dark. It was the middle of the week and a bit before Memorial Day. The neighbors weren’t yet in residence; the season and the Hamptons traffic jams hadn’t begun.

Again by night, with a sea breeze and little sound beside the slow rhythm of the Atlantic, the house could well have been the one in the Mata paintings, the old snapshots of the family.

Adding to that illusion, there were children in the cottage. Joan’s younger sister Catherina was taking care of her granddaughters, aged three and four, and had brought them to see Great-Grandmother Ruth.

The next morning, though, I stood on the porch with a mug of tea, and 1950 was gone. The pond had been drained decades ago and a summer mansion had been built on the site.

A more recent and even larger vacation home now stood on the meadow. The House That Ate the World, by comparison, now seemed like a charming relic of the past.

Joan came out and sat on the porch swing. Two years before, she’d had a brush with cancer. We’d all held our breaths, but it seemed that it was removed in time and she was free and clear. Joan and I had become close again in ways we hadn’t been since we were kids back on East Tenth Street.

She talked on her cell phone with her business partner about a corporate logo they were designing. Then she got a call from Selesta, who was driving out to the Hamptons with her husband, Sam.

They’d gotten married a couple of years before. Sammy was a nice young man with a shaved head. Selesta had a tattoo on her throat that matched the blue of his eyes.

Recently she’d told all of us that she was pregnant and that she and Sam had decided to have the child. That news was always in the background now. Her mother and grandmother discussed obstetricians and hospitals. Selesta didn’t understand why she might need a doctor who was discreet.

“Because you don’t want to end up on the front page of the National Enquirer,” Joan said. She shook her head when she got off the phone.

“Selesta told me once that it was good to always be a little scared,” I told her.

“She won’t know what fear is until she becomes a parent.”

Two very busy, very small young ladies returned with Catherina from the beach. Each carried a dripping pail. “We found living clams,” they told us. Though the clams looked as dead as could be, we exclaimed over them.

Ruth sat out on the lawn under a large umbrella. Her great-granddaughters went to show her the living clams.

“I married the least catlike man in the world,” Joan said. “I didn’t really understand that was what I was doing. That was his main qualification. Then Selesta was born, and I saw it hadn’t worked. I wasn’t used to my plans going awry. Not even my unformulated ones.”

“You told Selesta all this?”

“Recently I told her everything. Like you said.”

“The vestigial tail?” Joan had to have one removed when she was child.

She nodded.

Later that afternoon I sat with Ruth and the little girls. “Richie, you’d think after I’d made such a mess out of my children’s lives they wouldn’t trust me with their offspring. But you’d be wrong. Someone always needs to dump their kids.”

None of Catherina’s three daughters had shown the slightest trace of the margay. This was true also of her oldest daughter’s two children.

“It’s right out of Mendel,” Ruth said. “Poor Luis was at one end. Catherina’s at the other. Joan is somewhere in between.”

She was scratching one of her great-granddaughters’ backs. The child suddenly gave a great yawn and arched her back like a kitten.

Ruth looked at me with an expression that said, You’ve got to wonder.

Later when Selesta and Sam showed up, I told them, “Selesta, much as I love you, you’re grown up. You never want toys, you don’t like musicals anymore. I mean, how do I justify going to lousy shows if I can’t say I’m taking a kid? I want to be the godfather, maybe the god-grandfather to your kid.”

“That’s the main reason we decided to have a child,” she said, and Sam nodded his agreement.

She looked out at Ruth on her lounge chair with the children around her and said, “I want that for Joan.”

When you visit a maternity ward you scarcely know you’re in a hospital. It’s about life instead of illness, about bedazzled adults and the tiny, red-faced dictators who are going to run their lives.

Selesta’s child was a boy, the first male born into the family since Luis Mata over seventy years before.

I got to hold him. It’s nice, but in truth I like kids better when they’re standing up and talking. There’s a wonderful stuffed ocelot that I’m planning to give him. It could as easily be a margay. Selesta will be good with that.

Ruth was there in a motorized wheelchair with her care-giver.

“A perfectly normal baby,” said the very discreet doctor.

“Meaning he doesn’t have a tail,” said Joan quietly when the doctor left.

“Not yet, anyway,” murmured Ruth.

RICHARD BOWES has written five novels, the most recent of which is the Nebula Award-nominated From the Files of the Time Rangers. His most recent short fiction collection Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancieswas published in 2006. He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers awards.

Recent and forthcoming stories appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Subterranean, Clarkesworld, and Fantasy magazines, and the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Year’s Best Gay Stories 2008, Haunted Legends, and Naked Cityanthologies. Several of these stories are chapters in his novel in progress, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street.

His home page is www.rickbowes.com.

The great thing about writing for an anthology like this is that I already know the general theme before I start. In The Beastly Bride, my story would be about that place where human and animal intersect. Because wild cats have fascinated me since I was small, I knew the animal in question would be a member of the Felidae, the cat family.

The question then was how to handle this, what perspective to bring. Almost from the start I knew my story would be about a young woman, Selesta, who had already appeared in a story of mine called “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street,” which was included in Salon Fantastique, another anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

The narrator in “Dust Devil,” who would also be the narrator in “The Margay’s Children,” was Selesta’s godfather. This narrator had no children but many godchildren — a situation I know very well.

In this story we discover that Selesta’s grandfather was Mexican and had in his genetic makeup traces of a Latin American animal spirit. I thought first of making it an ocelot before settling on the ocelot’s cousin, the nocturnal, tree-dwelling margay. In handling this heritage, Selesta is as smart and resourceful as my godchildren almost always are.

And her godfather is quite wise and wonderful — because this, of course, is a fantasy anthology.