The Strangers' Gallery Read Online Free PDF Page A

The great Beethoven was one, he told me.
    Yes, sadly and fragilely vivacious, I thought upon first meeting her, in much more emotional distress than I was myself, though for a very different reason. She’d lost both her parents in a tragic automobile accident that summer. She and her sister, Ilse, had inherited the family house, though they were both living on their own—Ilse, in Montreal; Miranda, in the west end of St. John’s—and neither of them wanted to live in it, so they sold the house and split the money. With her share, Miranda bought the house across the street.
    Yet throughout the fall of 1994—for an entire year, in fact, after her arrival—we had become little more than friendly neighbours, saying hello as we passed on our way to and from the shops in the Square, chatting on the street if we were leaving for work or coming home at the same time or putting out the garbage. In mid-December, though, she brought over a Christmas gift, a basket of oranges and grapefruit, and, taking courage, I invited her in for a Christmas drink. She invited me back for a drink the next weekend, into her still almost empty house. There was a pine table and hardwood chairs and a daybed in the kitchen, but only an easel and stool in the living room. The dining room was still full of boxes and other stuff. There was nothing in the bedrooms upstairs, she told me. She still hadn’t purchased a real bed, though the daybed was a step up, very comfortable, she said. And was there something inviting in the way she said it? Or was I just imagining it? Perhaps I was.
    It was only a few days before Christmas, but no sign of Christmas decorations inside or out. Then she told me that she was going away for Christmas, to be with her sister, and asked me to look after her cat. My first thought, an unkind one, was that I’d been set up.
    Now I’m sure some relationships begin with a request to look after a neighbour’s cat, or dog or parrot or plants, but in this case it felt more like the beginning of a relationship with the cat itself, Dorothy by name, for I would be asked to look after her again at Easter and again in July.
    I didn’t really miss Pushkin, a big, fluffy, orange, half-breed Persian (we weren’t sure what the other half was) that Elaine and I had adopted from the spca, and who had departed with Elaine. Though spayed, he was an outdoor cat, loved the great outdoors, even in winter, braved the ice and snow, the spring and fall rains and winds. Except for his eyelash-licking habit, which we’d cured him of, he was not needy, was indifferent to affection really. If you left his food and water on the back step, you hardly ever saw him. Sometimes, however, seemingly for no good reason, Pushkin would climb the backdoor screen and meow pitifully to get in, for he would get his lengthy talons caught in the wire mesh about halfway up. Hanging there, silhouetted against the light, he looked like a black pelt stretched and hung to dry. But when you saw him or heard him and let him in, he would look around the house as if he didn’t recognize it, or recognized it too clearly, and almost immediately would want to be let out again. He was always on the go. Neutering had certainly not made him sluggish or passive, as we’d been told it would.
    But Dorothy—how to describe Dorothy, my first single-parent experience? A slug with fur, and always shedding. No…slugs moved faster. She was a fifteen-year-old, neutered tortoiseshell who was almost as big as a tortoise. Miranda had inherited Dorothy from her parents. Spoiled obscenely, this basket potato rarely went out, hardly ever moved, and tolerated stroking with a feline superciliousness so refined and undisguised it
hurt
a human—this human, anyway. Dorothy fancied high-end grub like Friskies Chef’s Dinner pâté de foie gras, not as a treat, mind you, but for a week or more would eat nothing else. Then, for no good