The Half-Hidden (Part Five)

By Marc-Yves Tumin

When Danielle returned home from the hospital, she repaired directly to her beloved garden, and fell to her knees amid a fanfare of Edenic sunflowers, embracing their soaring stalks and gazing at their summits, where, she insisted, she spied Keatsie peering down at her.

Later, while recuperating from her paralysis and its sequela, she habitually reclined on a deck chair, swathed in a tumble of silken robes, her head in a turbaned surcingle of towels, contemplating her sanctuary.

She maintained that her phantasmagoric friend looked in on her, each dusk. And lying abed, Danielle said, she was transformed by his antics, becoming a throwback, a proficient in the craft of accubation, a patrician lady attending a banquet in ancient Rome, a sophisticated observer of an arcane figurant's silhouette, frisking across the garden wall in its peculiar gallop as though to amuse the audience with an impromptu shadow play.

As I have been at pains to point out, nobody else had witnessed the mesmeric moggy, and none believed the tyke's farfetched tales, which could have been explained somewhat by "the obvious: the imminence of a being accustomed to diurnation, a genuine specimen of a species of lychnobite," as a strolling professor put it to his glass of sherry.

In other words, the furtive feline could have slept by day and worked its mischievous tricks after dark, which seemed logical enough. Indeed, once one got past the simplicity of the solution to the difficult bit, even a child could have comprehended the thesis.

The abstruse part, as you may have guessed, was that the keys to the puzzle of this prodigy were held by those eager to supplant her nonpareil imagination. Hence, the less one believed her story, the more one wished it were true. Ah, there was a collection of well-honed rascals, anxious to purvey their respective wares and improve her so in one way or another to their advantage.

That said, a shaken branch, a stirring of weeds in a corner of the garden, a passing shadow across a flock of canorous cardinals - possibly animated by a solitary puff of wind - a roughened patch upon a reflecting stone - creating the effect of a three-dimensional translucence - were all the proofs that one could advance in support of the infant's fondest phantasm.

Alas, that fateful summer, Danielle's parents packed her off to Geneva for the newest therapy, where she was dreadfully unhappy, and dreamt that she had eloped with gypsies, and descried the outsized cat at the midway of a country fair, and followed but couldn't catch it up, and was thwarted at every turn by someone who'd glimpsed it and pointed her hither and thither, while she was unable to sort things out. And she succumbed to despondency and lay down in a muddle beneath a rose bush, and dreamed in her dream that Keatsie had whispered to her while she slept within her sleep, and confided something of significance in an incomprehensible language.

The sleeper had awakened in her reverie and, with her accomplice, explored an ancient porch behind her domicile, a place she hadn't noticed before, and discovered a box heaped with intricate watches: shiny round instruments that started and stopped when one pressed a button. A mantle of dust on one side of the dormant devices became scintillant as she handled them. However, when she set them off, with a click, their hands had spun in contrary directions.

Time passed and Danielle was shipped stateside from Switzerland. It was autumn. The stealthy night visitor was absent. And though she called to him repeatedly, he ignored her appeals and declined to materialize. Perhaps he was miffed or preoccupied elsewhere. Needless to say, the child wept herself to sleep.

Then, one afternoon, while her parents were disporting themselves in Newport, and Danielle served tea to her imaginary friends - reserving a place for her scruffy favorite, should he deign to appear - she detected a deep chuffing next door, as if the panting of a steam locomotive. She stood on tiptoe and peeked through the formidable wood fence, which separated the rear gardens, to discover the source of the noise.

Earlier that year, against his better judgment, Danielle's father ¬- a partner in a white shoe law firm - had represented in court some men of disreputable character. An indictment had been handed down and they had been charged with possession of "a trousseau of beneficences," as they referred to - how shall I say? - certain premature legacies that somehow passed into their safekeeping.

After the acquittal of this cadre - christened "The Questuaries" by a society columnist - there was a fête for them in the adjoining townhouse. The following day, the chief questuary and his cohorts went swanning off to Rhode Island to frolic aboard their mahogany schooner and foot the light fantastic on their sprawling estate, where everything was outsized, including their bullmastiff, Mordred, who was "10 stone 10" (i.e., 150 pounds), if he was an ounce, imported from Merry England to discourage the newshounds.

(Continued next week)