I must have dozed off, though for moments or centuries I cannot say, for I was awakened quite suddenly by the sensation of being smothered and deprived of air. A surge of gasping panic overwhelmed me, and I swatted at the thing on my face, realizing in the same instant that I was striking the cat. He screamed to be so rudely handled and leapt to the coffee table. “Harpo,” I called for him and sat up to apologize. Diffident, the cat slunk to the throw pillows, and I had to grab him before he escaped completely. I held him in my lap, stroking him between the ears, whispering sweet nothings, and trying to make amends. Now, the old wives’ tale about cats smothering people, particularly sleeping babies, is based upon the notion that when a child is completely out of it, the cat, attracted by the scent of milk, will sit on the face to suck out the baby’s breath, but the plain truth is that cats dislike the smell of human breath. There is a report from a doctor in Helsingborg, Sweden, who wrote about his cat and new baby. Seems the cat had just given birth to kittens a few days before the infant son was brought home from the hospital. Upon hearing the child’s first cry, the cat went to the nursery to investigate, and later that night, she moved all her kittens into the cradle. The crying baby, the doctor surmised, attuned the maternal instincts of the cat, and since she could not move this giant “kitten” to her litter, she brought the kittens to the baby. But no, it is not generally true that a cat will smother anyone intentionally, and in Harpo’s case, he bothered my rest only if he wanted to be let out of the house.
As we walked to the front door, the cat weaved between my legs at each stride, and when I let him out, he scooted across the porch into the yard, disappearing in the darkness. For some reason, I thought I heard him say “So long,” but soon realized the words were merely the play of my own thoughts on the radio of my imagination. I stood on the threshold watching the quiet early morning. On the lawn, where the tangle of bicycles should have been evident as a dark heap, there was nothing but smooth grass and empty space, and I began to question my memory of having seen them that afternoon. No traffic passed, and no one strolled along the sidewalks. In both directions, the lampposts glowed in a line that followed the curve of the street, and above the rooftops and leafy trees, a corner of the National Cathedral loomed, my private parapet. An airplane cut across the heavens, red lights on the wingtips in contrast to the faint white stars. A mockingbird sang in some treetop blocks away, the changing patterns of its stolen melodies designed to attract a mate to the nest. Crickets kept time. But all else was still as if painted on some universal mural, and I felt unable to enter into this outside world, for if I did I would be trapped by the landscape and would vanish forever when the moment passed. One step forward, and I would be swept out like Bachelard’s dreams. The house, despite all of the strange things happening here, felt safer, and I retreated behind the door. My headache abated at once, but I just stood motionless, trying to sort through the events of the day. A woman moved through my mind, insisting upon being remembered. Her face began to take shape like an unfinished portrait on a canvas.
A cry broke my reverie, sudden and sharp, almost inhuman in its urgent intensity. At first I thought the skirl emanated from Harpo, for he often sounded like the bagpipes when he was desperate to come back in, but the sound repeated itself from inside the house, upstairs in the vicinity of the bathroom, judging by the echo. I took the steps by twos, anxious at the cause of such distress.
Huddled around the bathtub, the old man, Dolly, and Jane had their backs to me, and only when I stepped closer could I see the object of their rapt attention. Seated on the rim, Alice held to her breast a baby, not the cloth poppet, but an actual newborn, the soft spot on its bald head beating in rhythm as it nursed and one tiny fist clutching a long red tendril of its mother’s hair. Mashed against her skin, its tiny mouth sucked with gusto and then paused to catch its breath, repeated the process, slowed, and then stopped. Alice pinched the tiny lips to break the suction and then slid her nipple out of the child’s mouth, and by reflex, it gulped once or twice, the mouth pursed as if imagining what it had been about, and then the little one fell asleep. My eyes lingered on Alice’s bare breast as she tucked it inside her dress. Tattooed just above the nipple appeared the tiniest of witches, astride a broom, as if flying over a full moon.
“Isn’t he adorable?” Jane asked. “A perfect little boy. Ten fingers and ten toes.”
Alice handed the baby to Dolly, who laid him upright against her shoulder and began patting him gently on the back. Rearranging her dress to its standard position, Alice sidled up to me and said, “He’ll have red hair, too, when it comes in, but he has your eyes.”
“Pardon me?”
All three women grinned and gawked at me as if I were a specimen in a zoo.
“I have no idea what you are inferring,” I said. “Where the devil did that baby come from?”
The old man clapped a bony hand on my shoulder. “Ah, Sonny, you don’t mean to tell me you are uncertain as to the workings of the birds and the bees? When a man and a woman love each—”
I shrugged out of his grasp. “Not that … I understand the mechanics, you old fool. What I want to know are the particulars concerning this particular child of Alice’s. It wasn’t here when I left just a minute ago.”
“Nine months,” he said. “Or more precisely forty weeks, if all goes right.”
“The details of human gestation are quite well known, even to a single man such as myself.”
The little boy burped, loud as a trucker, and the rest of them giggled. Dolly handed the baby to his mother, and Alice laid him to sleep in a magazine rack where I usually kept my bathroom reading material, old issues of Architectural Digest and noteworthy issues of the weekly “Home” section of the Washington Post. The newborn fussed upon leaving his mother’s arms, but soon settled into a deep sleep. Mesmerized, we all watched for several minutes as if there was nothing more fascinating than a baby at rest, seeing perhaps in the child’s complete surrender some capability lost to our world-weary adult selves.
I whispered to Alice, “You had no baby when you flew through the mirror.”