Mice in the Walls

When the doctors told Sarah a blood cancer killed Kittie, she demanded to know whether it couldn’t have been passed to her daughter by the mice in the walls. And though the doctors sought to reassure her that this was highly unlikely, Sarah was not reassured. She knew her surviving daughter summoned the infestation, like a mekhasheyfe bringing forth the shedim. She knew they had taken Kittie’s light. At a minimum your mother encouraged them. She had done nothing to stop them.

That first horrible night, when Abe had returned, alone, to the silent home, he noticed the floor lamp behind the white velveteen high back chair nearest the curtains begin to flicker, and he noticed a mouse cross the parquet like a shadow, disappearing behind the floor length curtains. He made a mental note to pick up some traps in the morning.

He stripped his clothes as he walked down the herringbone hallway, leaving his shirt and trousers on the floor, stripping his socks and underclothes on the white and black bathroom tile. The tiles were cool on his feet. It was a relief to free his crotch and his middle, which had been gradually expanding over the years, from his constricting clothes.

The bathroom was illuminated only by a small night light behind the door. He extended himself awkwardly across the bathtub to adjust the shower nozzles on the wall. Pulling the shower lever too soon, the cold water jetted into his hair and splashed off his fleshy back. He stepped away from the edge of the tub, striking the base of the pedestal sink with his broad lower back, scraping the soft skin along his vertebrae as he straightened.

Goddamnit! He slammed the wall with the palm of his hand. He leaned his head against his forearm. He sobbed. Goddamnit!

Goddamnit!

As Abe padded back to his bedroom across the hall, a large towel wrapped around his expanding middle, he heard some scratching squeaking in the girls’ wall. It sounded like it was adjacent to the bathroom.

Goddamnit!

Sarah’s end table lamp flickered for a moment, before blinking into darkness.

The infestation came forth even as Kittie lay sick and dying in her hospital bed. Abe set traps, but they were useless against the rising tide. The brutes chewed through first one wire and then another, and gradually each lamp blinked out in turn.

Abe swept their droppings away each morning, collecting another dozen dead and bloating mice from his traps, but it was not enough to stanch the rising tide. He heard them scratching and squeaking in the walls at night. He saw them darting across the floor. A mouse ran across his face as he lay on his back staring into the blackness.

Kittie died.

The apartment filled one night with people and with food. Every lamp cord had been chewed through, only ceiling lamps and candles illuminated the home.

The mice were so loud in the walls that mourning guests were forced to yell their condolences if they wished to be heard above the incessant clawing and scraping and screeching. Mouse shit piled in the corners. Urine streaked the floorboards.

The mice had grown large and bold, demanding, and indolent. They huddled in the corners and under the dining table, waiting for scraps like hyenas before the pride. They fought over scraps like alley cats, rising on their hind legs, showing their claws and their sharp incisors, malevolence glinting in their black eyes and gleaming smooth coats.

A mourner who was there that night told me Sarah wielded her broom like a mace, battering the mice into walls, crushing them in corners, splitting them with a ferocious thrust of the bristles, leaving their juices to puddle about their leaking, round bellies like peaches left too long to molder on a counter. Furiously sweeping away piles of dead mice and mouse shit beneath the shoes of the mourning guests.

She donned long rubber gloves. She gathered a bucket. She washed the floorboards, scrubbing between the thick legs of mourning well-wishers. At last, every guest was sated. They wandered back into the night.

Then it was just the Baron-Kagan family: Sarah, Abe, your mother, Minnie and Aaron, Al and his partner Leon, and Rachel from upstairs.

Still the mice scraped and squinted and clawed. The dim ceiling lamp in the herringbone hallway flickered. And went out.

Sarah sat in a corner beneath a tall stool. Her hands were dressed in long yellow gloves up to her elbows, which she rested on her knees. She howled. It was a howl. Piteous, and defiant, it started as a moan and ended in a scream. It was the howl of a wounded beast. It was heard in every apartment, and through every open window. It was a howl to raise the dead. It flew out the kitchen window, and swirled about the courtyard, and settled itself among the headstones of the Cedar Grove cemetery along the Neponset River three stories below. I believe it rang still in your mother’s ears as she herself lay dying, her cold hand painfully gripping mine, at the end of her long and painful illness.

As the lights blinked out in the apartment, so they began blinking out in the Baron-Kagan family. First Kittie’s light blinked out. And then, though she would still draw breath for several years, Sarah’s light flickered and went dark. Lucy believed she was the first to notice the flickering of her mother’s light. Sarah had intentionally damped the lamp in her eyes when she looked at Lucy. Lucy said Abe was the last to notice because he refused, principally out of loyalty and devotion, to see how far into the valley and the shadow Sarah had descended. I say principally because at first, before the light seemed to fail, Sarah damped her lamps toward specific people, first Lucy and then Alma and then all the girls, and eventually all her neighbors. But she preserved a little light, albeit one that gleamed but dimly and intermittently, for Abe, and even after the light seems to have failed in her entirely, after Aaron, and then Minnie, followed Kittie to sheol, Abe was still able to draw forth a little luminescence, a precious little ember of recognition, that seemed to gutter briefly in her eye, even for a moment, and it was enough for him to keep going.

Lucy told me the other person who could bring out Sarah’s light was her uncle Al. He could draw a smile out of his sister even in her darkest moments. He had a gravity-defying ability to laugh at the notions tormenting her the most. Sarah would laugh, or produce a rueful smile at least when Al, in his round cadences, teased her about the night she massacred the mice. And even though it was the night of the repast, and even though it had ended so piteously, in Al’s mirthful telling Sarah at least could smile.

Uncle Al blinked into the darkness, like dirty headlamps peering through smoke. He could not avert the slow tragedy. Like an infestation of mice which traps alone are insufficient to arrest, so the darkness eventually defeated even Al’s gamely lambent illumination.

The tragedy of losing Kittie and then her mother, was now compounded for Lucy by losing the light her father had always kept burning in two lamps behind his eyes for her. It was not intentional with him, and if he ever noticed what had happened it was far too late even to elucidate a sense of loss or sorrow in his breast, for it was circumstances which were changing Abe. He was just trying to cope, and being but a man, there were parts of his soul that he allowed unconsciously to atrophy, and eventually permanently to somnambulate, and among these pieces was his Lucy-love. After Kittie died, and life returned to what he imagined would be a new sort of stasis, Abe spent more time building up his business, reasoning that at least in that capacity his natural qualities - an indefatigable work ethic, a fierce attention to detail, an indomitable competitive spirit, a passion for thrift - would be put to good use. His business thrived, even in the increasingly difficult economic conditions of the early 30’s. However, there is no such thing as stasis, and a second project - trying to reason with his father-in-law about finances - was less successful, and without Sarah’s moderating influence the relationship began to deteriorate in ways that seemed, to Lucy, to drain even more light from their home.

Abe and Aaron would go weeks without talking. Lucy tried playing mediator as both men spiraled to increasingly less reasonable positions. In this hateful role, she realized that Aaron and Minnie were living increasingly in the magical world of their childhood. Soon they would no longer be able to care for themselves. Given Sarah’s state who would care for them? She tried to make her father see, but he was only a man and so consumed with Sarah-worry and Aaron-loathing that there was simply not enough space to rationally consider the situation.

Uncle Al was just emerging from Mother’s bedroom, where he had been sitting at the edge of her bed, making her laugh by reminding her of a practical joke he had played upon Maureen Katz when they were all in Sunday School together. Al had convinced Maureen that the rabbi knew about a liaison between she and Jacob Shpall, and that her parents were meeting at that moment with the rabbi in his office down the hall. He convinced Maureen that the best thing to do would be to walk down to the rabbi’s office now and admit everything to her parents and to him. What made this so funny was that he had told Maureen that the reason the rabbi knew about the incident at all was that Al had felt honor bound to tell him, when in fact Al had no actual knowledge of such an encounter, having made the story up from whole cloth. Even all these years later neither of them was sure why Maureen reacted with such horror, or what must have happened when she knocked on the rabbi’s door, since he of course had no knowledge of any of this. Al joined Lucy and her father at the table, still wiping a mirthful tear from his eye, in time to hear the end of their conversation, and he offered an interesting solution. Rachel was now out of high school, the Kagans knew her well, and she adored them. Why not ask Rachel to help around the place a few days a week? And in the coup de grace that won Abe to the idea, Al offered to pay for the service himself.

Your Ma always said that Al was like that, a bit of bioluminescence in the darkness.