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As it turned out, it was Father who took up most of the Friday session with Min Henry, not the list of words and images she had jotted down in the still of the night (wet fur and fast current; also mouth “O” in surprise and too fast for fear and thunk!). Her ambiguous feelings toward her parent, his peculiar combination of the ineffectual and the quick to anger, her jumble of respect and love and fear that must, it occurred to her, be very like the feelings her mother still bore for the man who had abandoned her with two small children and a mountain of debts.
What did all that have to do with a cat? she asked the therapist at the close of the session.
Patience, the woman said. And maybe we should meet twice a week.
The nightmare retreated a fraction, in frequency if not intensity. Once or twice a night instead of every couple of hours: cat/panic/bench, father/thud/wake.
The following Wednesday, Lauren forced herself to ask her mother again about what might lie in the past.
“The cat again, dear?”
“When I was with Daddy.” Daddy? she thought; I haven’t called him that since I was eight.
“Oh, sweetie, I wouldn’t know. I mean, your father often took you and your brother off for a while so I could go to the hairdressers’ or some such thing. You’d go to the beach or the country club. He liked to show you off. But I’d have thought that if something happened during one of those outings, he’d have mentioned it. Then again I suppose he could have told me and I’ve forgotten it, I do forget so much. But not usually from the past-isn’t it fu
“Arty? I don’t remember-wait a minute. Was he a man with a red face and a mustache?”
“That’s right, fancy you remembering that! And he was always smoking a cigar. It had a lovely smell, I thought, but your father wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. You loved the smell, always followed him around, even when he went outside to smoke. He called you his little shadow,” she said wistfully. “You missed him so when he left, moped around for days.” I missed him, Lauren heard in her mother’s voice.
“Where did he go?”
“They told me he’d gone to Montana.”
Lauren waited for more; when nothing more came, she found herself sitting forward, as if to pull information out of the telephone. Her mother’s uncharacteristically brief answer seemed to echo down the line.
“Did he?” she prompted.
“Oh, dear,” her mother replied with a sigh. “I don’t know. I suppose he must have, although at the time, well, I thought he’d maybe had an accident, out hiking somewhere. He was a great one for hiking.”
“Didn’t anyone go looking for him?”
“No, honey, that was only for a couple of days. And then he called your father to tell him he was quitting-a middle-aged crisis I guess they’d call it today. Anyway, he just quit, threw it all over of a sudden and left town. It must have been right after that fishing trip, come to think of it. That’s right-your brother was just born, you were moping around and having tantrums at the drop of a hat, your father was even more short-tempered than usual. We thought it really was very thoughtless of Arty, to leave him in the lurch like that, and at such a difficult time. Then a few weeks later the accountant found that Arty’d been siphoning off cash. He was your father’s manager, you remember. Young for the job, but capable. Later the police decided he’d panicked, thinking they were on to him, and that was why he left in such a hurry. He probably moved to Mexico or something-your father had a few phone conversations with him, asking him to take care of some things, but those stopped after a few months.”
“I might have seen something that day he took me on the boat?” Lauren asked, trying to tug the conversation back to where it had begun.
“You might have, I suppose. I wasn’t in any shape to take notice of much right then. I’d had all these stitches, down there, you know, and they were so uncomfortable, and then you were going through this phase of being jealous of your new brother and so kept waking me up at night with your bad dreams and forgetting your toilet training and bursting into tears at the least thing. Which was perfectly normal with a new baby in the house,” she hastened to say, “even if maybe a little extreme. In the end I had to agree with my mother and your father that the best way to let you get over your naughtiness was to ignore it as much as possible. And you did settle down, after a while. In fact, you became a new child, so quiet and obedient. You were always so good with your brother, too.”
Her mother dithered on for a while, recounting in intimate detail the extensive difficulties the stitches had caused, even going so far as to speculate aloud (Does she even remember that she’s got her daughter on the other end of the phone? Lauren wondered) that the lingering discomfort, and at a time when her husband needed her most, what with the embezzlement and Arty’s treachery and all, had contributed to the divorce.
Lauren interrupted desperately, before her mother could go into any greater detail. “Well, think about it, Mother, see if you can remember anything traumatic involving a cat.”
“I’ll try, dear. You could call your father and ask him. I have a number for him somewhere.”
Lauren cut her off, knowing that she was about to take the phone over to the desk and begin a search. She had no intention of asking her father about it; she hadn’t talked to him in so long she’d forgotten the sound of his voice, and she wasn’t about to resume their relationship with a revelation of her psychic distress. Maybe her mother’s approach was best and would work as well now as it had then. Ignore it. and it’ll go away.
Her mother’s approach, to ignore distress. Look at their conversations centering around the cat: She’d been fond of Arty, that was obvious, but expressed neither resentment nor even puzzlement at his abandonment. Then must have come a hellish time-a newborn and a jealous three-year-old, a demanding husband and the first threats of bankruptcy, the revelation that a trusted friend (or more than a friend?) had stolen them blind. Creditors, an abrupt change in lifestyle, a husband fleeing infamy and leaving her behind to raise two children on a secretary’s pay. Lauren’s father, meanwhile, had salvaged enough out of the whole mess to afford a nice house on a tropical island, complete with a twenty-four-year-old “housekeeper.”
Ignore it, and it’ll go away. Only it didn’t. The nightmares continued. Not every night now, but at least every other, she would see the spi