Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

tolerate pretty Yolande petting him and fussing over him; but he ignored the rest of the household, even the servants who fed him, and once in Leah’s earshot he hissed angrily as Gideon stooped to pet his head. “All right, then,” Gideon muttered, rising to his full height and resisting the impulse to kick the creature, “go back to hell where you belong.”
    Because Mahalaleel was so discriminating, it soon became a mark of good fortune if he curled up at someone’s feet, or rubbed around someone’s legs, making his throaty crackling noise. He had a habit of coming up behind both Leah and Vernon and thrusting his big head beneath their hands importunately, demanding to be petted; it was an extraordinary gesture, and never failed to astonish and delight Leah. “Aren’t you bold!” she laughed. “You know exactly what you want and how to get it.”
    She and her niece Yolande brushed his thick cloudy coat with Leah’s own gold-backed hairbrush, and tried to lift him in their arms, laughing at his weight. In the right mood he could tolerate a surprising amount of attention, but he always stiffened when the youngest children approached: Christabel was not welcome, nor were Aveline’s noisy children, nor Lily’s (except for Yolande and Raphael), and even cautious Bromwell, frowning behind his glasses, wanting only to “observe” and take notes on Mahalaleel. (He had already begun his journal, which was filled with minute observations, and measurements, and even the results of several dissections performed on small rodents.) Immediately after settling in the house Mahalaleel drove away the other tomcats, and made coquettish subordinates of the females; the household’s six or seven dogs kept their distance from him. He was allowed to roam nearly anywhere he wished. At first he slept in the kitchen, on the wide warm stone hearth; then he chose a comfortable old leather chair in the room known as Raphael’s library; then he spent one night in the first-floor linen closet, sprawled luxuriously on grandmother Cornelia’s fine Spanish tablecloth; then he was discovered beneath the red velvet Victorian settee in a little-used drawing room, snoring faintly amid the dust balls. Sometimes he disappeared for an entire day, sometimes for a night; once he was gone three days in a row and Leah was heartbroken, convinced that he had abandoned her. And what a bad-luck sign that would be . . . ! But he reappeared suddenly, in fact at her very heels, making his hoarse guttural sound and butting with his head against her hand.
    He made grandfather Noel nervous by coming up silently behind him, and staring with his wide-spaced tawny green eyes as if he were about to speak. He teased the kitchen help for food, and was rather shameless about his tricks: fed by one servant he nevertheless cajoled another into giving him food, and then another: and yet he never exactly mewed like a hungry cat, he never condescended to beg. He quickly became something of a household puzzle. How was it possible, the children asked, that Mahalaleel could be sleeping soundly by the fireplace in the parlor, but when you left the room or only turned your head he was gone—simply gone? Albert and Jasper swore they had seen Mahalaleel up a tall pine back of one of the logging roads, a mile and a half away. It was one of those pines with no branches or limbs for a considerable distance—seventy-five feet or more—and there was Mahalaleel perched on the lowest limb, absolutely motionless, his hair gray and indistinct, his enormous tail curved about to cover his paws, his wide staring intelligent face terrible as that of a great horned owl about to swoop down upon its prey. They wondered—how could a cat so large manage to climb that tree?—and was he trapped there, would he need help getting down? They called him but he did no more than glance down at them, as if he’d never seen them before. They tried to shake the tree, without success. “Mahalaleel,