he stopped short of the stairs, afraid of treading on one of their paws
or tails as they poured into the upstairs hallway. A moment later they
streamed over the top step and swarmed around him: twenty-six of them,
if his most recent count was not out of date. Eleven were black,
several more were chocolate-brown or tobacco-brown or charcoal-gray, two
were deep gold, and only one was white. Violet and Verbina, his
sisters, preferred dark cats, the darker the better.
The animals milled around him, walking over his shoes, rubbing against
his legs, curling their tails around his calve Among them were two
Angoras, an Abyssinian, a tall Manx, a Maltese, and a tortoise shell,
but most were mongrel cats of no easily distinguished lineage. Some had
green some yellow, some silver-gray, some blue, and they all regarded
him with great interest. Not one of them purred or mowed; their
inspection was conducted in absolute silence.
Candy did not particularly like cats, but he tolerated them not only
because they belonged to his sisters but because, in a way, they were
virtually an extension of Violet and Verbina To have hurt them, to have
spoken harshly to them, would have been the same as striking out at his
sisters, which he could never do because his mother, on her death bed,
had admonished him to provide for the girls and protect them.
In less than a minute the cats had fulfilled their mission and almost as
one, turned from him. With much swishing of tail and flexing of feline
muscles and rippling of fur, they flowed like a single beast to the head
of the stairs and down.
By the time he reached the first step, they were at the dining room
turning, slipping out of sight. He descended to the low hall, and the
cats were gone. He passed the lightless and must smelling parlor. The
odor of mildew drifted out of the stud where shelves were filled with
the moldering romance novels that his mother had liked so much, and when
he pass through the dimly lit dining room, litter crunched under his
shoes.
Violet and Verbina were in the kitchen. They were identical twins. They
were equally blond, with the same fair and flawless skin, with the same
china-blue eyes, smooth brows, high cheekbones, straight noses with
delicately carved nostrils, lips that were naturally red without
lipstick, and small even teeth as bone-white as those of their cats.
Candy tried to like his sisters, and failed. For his mother’s sake he
could not dislike them, so he remained neutral, sharing the house with
them but not as a real family might share it. They were too thin, he
thought, fragile-looking, almost frail, and too pale, like creatures
that infrequently saw the sun which in fact seldom warmed them, since
they rarely went outside. Their slim hands were well manicured, for
they groomed themselves as constantly as if they, too, were cats; but,
to Candy, their fingers seemed excessively long, unnaturally flexible
and nimble. Their mother had been robust, with strong features and good
color, and Candy often wondered how such a vital woman could have
spawned this pallid pair.
The twins had piled up cotton blankets, six thick, in one corner of the
big kitchen, to make a large area where the cats could lie comfortably,
though the padding was actually for Violet and Verbina, so they could
sit on the floor among the cats for hours at a time. When Candy entered
the room, they were on the blankets, with cats all around them and in
their laps. Violet was filing Verbina’s fingernails with an emery
board. Neither of them looked up, though of course they had already
greeted him through the cats. Verbina had never spoken a word within
Candy’s hearing, not in her entire twenty-five years-the twins were four
years younger than he was,-but he was not sure whether she was unable to
talk, merely unwilling to talk, or shy of talking only when around him.
Violet was nearly as silent as her sister, but she did speak when
necessary; apparently, at the moment, she had nothing that needed to be
said.
He stood by the refrigerator, watching them as they huddled over