The Cat's Pajamas Read Online Free PDF

with a thrust of her numb fingers. She cried out.
    â€œ His footsteps. Oh God, what a little man! Do you see the size of them, do you see ! My God, what a little man!”
    And even as she crouched there, on hands and knees, sobbing, the wind and the winter and the night did her a gentle kindness. Even as she watched, the snow fell into and around and over the footprints, smoothing and filling and erasing them until at last, with no trace, with no memory of their smallness, they were gone.
    Then, and only then, did she stop crying.

SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN
1950
    I T WAS THE CRYING LATE AT NIGHT , perhaps, the hysteria, and then the sobbing violently, and after it had passed away into a sighing, I could hear the husband’s voice through the wall. “There, there,” he would say, “there, there.”
    I would lie upon my back in my night bed and listen and wonder, and the calendar on my wall said August 2002. And the man and his wife, young, both about thirty, and fresh-looking, with light hair and blue eyes, but lines around their mouths, had just moved into the rooming house where I took my meals and worked as a janitor in the downtown library.
    Every night and every night it would be the same thing, the wife crying, and the husband quieting her with his soft voice beyond my wall. I would strain to hear what started it, but I could never tell. It wasn’t anything he said, I was positive of this, or anything he did. I was almost certain, in fact, that it started all by itself, late at night, about two o’clock. She would wake up, I theorized, and I would hear that first terrorized shriek and then the long crying. It made me sad. As old as I am, I hate to hear a woman cry.
    I remember the first night they came here, a month ago, an August evening here in this town deep in Illinois, all the houses dark and everyone on the porches licking ice-cream bars. I remember walking through the kitchen downstairs and standing in the old smells of cooking and hearing but not seeing the dog lapping water from the pan under the stove, a nocturnal sound, like water in a cave. And I walked on through to the parlor and in the dark, with his face devilish pink from exertion, Mr. Fiske, the landlord, was fretting over the air conditioner, which, damned thing, refused to work. Finally in the hot night he wandered outside onto the mosquito porch—it was made for mosquitoes only, Mr. Fiske averred, but went there anyway.
    I went out onto the porch and sat down and unwrapped a cigar to fire away my own special mosquitoes, and there were Grandma Fiske and Alice Fiske and Henry Fiske and Joseph Fiske and Bill Fiske and six other boarders and roomers, all unwrapping Eskimo pies.
    It was then that the man and his wife, as suddenly as if they had sprung up out of the wet dark grass, appeared at the bottom of the steps, looking up at us like the spectators in a summer night circus. They had no luggage. I always remembered that. They had no luggage. And their clothes did not seem to fit them.
    â€œIs there a place for food and sleep?” said the man, in a halting voice.
    Everyone was startled. Perhaps I was the one who saw them first, then Mrs. Fiske smiled and got out of her wicker chair and came forward. “Yes, we have rooms.”
    â€œHow much is the money?” asked the man in the broiling dark.
    â€œTwenty dollars a day, with meals.”
    They did not seem to understand. They looked at each other.
    â€œTwenty dollars,” said Grandma.
    â€œWe’ll move into here,” said the man.
    â€œDon’t you want to look first?” asked Mrs. Fiske.
    They came up the steps, looking back, as if someone was following them.
    That was the first night of the crying.
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    B REAKFAST WAS SERVED EVERY MORNING at seven-thirty, large, toppling stacks of pancakes, huge jugs of syrup, islands of butter, toast, many pots of coffee, and cereal if you wished. I was working on my cereal when the new couple came down